Heading with a Purpose

A newspaper story about terrorism, war, politics or football is not likely to be read in the same way as a gothic novel, college catalog or physics textbook. Similarly, tne process used to understand a casual conversation is unlikely to be the same as the process of understanding a biology lecture or TV situation comedy. One of the primary differences amongst these various types of comprehension is that the reader or listener will nave different goals in each case. The reasons a person nan for reading, or the goals he has when engaging in conversation wlll nave a strong affect on what he pays attention to, how deeply the input is processed, and what information is incorporated into memory. The computer model of understanding described nere addresses the problem of using a reader's purpose to assist in natural language understanding. This program, the Integrated Partial Parser (IPP) ~s designed to model the way people read newspaper stories in a robust, comprehensive, manner. IPP nan a set of interests, much as a human reader does. At the moment it concentrates on stories about International violence and terrorism.