Conceptual dependency theory is a model of
natural language understanding
Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an ...
used in
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine
A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...
systems.
Roger Schank at
Stanford University introduced the model in 1969, in the early days of artificial intelligence. This model was extensively used by Schank's students at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
such as
Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and
Janet Kolodner.
Schank developed the model to represent knowledge for natural language input into computers. Partly influenced by the work of
Sydney Lamb, his goal was to make the meaning independent of the words used in the input, i.e. two sentences identical in meaning, would have a single representation. The system was also intended to draw logical inferences.
The model uses the following basic representational tokens:
[''Language, mind, and brain'' by Thomas W. Simon, Robert J. Scholes 1982 page 105]
:* ''real world objects'', each with some ''attributes''.
:* ''real world actions'', each with attributes
:* ''times''
:* ''locations''
A set of ''conceptual transitions'' then act on this representation, e.g. an ATRANS is used to represent a transfer such as "give" or "take" while a PTRANS is used to act on locations such as "move" or "go". An MTRANS represents mental acts such as "tell", etc.
A sentence such as "John gave a book to Mary" is then represented as the action of an ATRANS on two real world objects John and Mary.
See also
*
Augmented transition network An augmented transition network or ATN is a type of graph theoretic structure used in the operational definition of formal languages, used especially in parsing relatively complex natural languages, and having wide application in artificial intelli ...
*
Conceptual space A conceptual space is a geometric structure that represents a number of quality dimensions, which denote basic features by which concepts and objects can be compared, such as weight, color, taste, temperature, pitch, and the three ordinary spatia ...
*
Scripts (artificial intelligence)
References
{{Reflist
External links
* Lytinen, S.L. (1992
"Conceptual Dependency and its Descendants"''Computers, Mathematics, and Applications'' 23(2-5):51-73
Natural language parsing
History of artificial intelligence
Semantic relations