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 machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

systems.

Roger Schank Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

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 research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

such as

Robert Wilensky Robert Wilensky (26 March 1951 – 15 March 2013) was an American computer scientist and emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, with his main focus of research in artificial intelligence. Academic career In 1971, Wilens ...

, Wendy Lehnert, and

Janet Kolodner Janet Lynne Kolodner is an American cognitive scientist and learning scientist and Regents' Professor Emerita in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was Founding Editor in Chie ...

. Schank developed the model to represent knowledge for natural language input into computers. Partly influenced by the work of

Sydney Lamb Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has speciali ...

, 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.

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

See also

References

External links