Representations Of Actions As An Interlingua

Figure 3: General architecture of the animation system The planner uses information from the general schema, such as preconditions and post-assertions, as well as information derived from the agents' capabilities and the objects properties to fill in these gaps in several ways: • to select the way (activity) in which the instruction is performed (enter by walking, by swimming , etc.); • to determine the prepartory actions that must be completed before the instruction is carried out, (for example, in order for an agent to open the door, the door has to be reachable and that may involve a locomotion process); • to decompose the action into smaller units (put the glass on the table, involves getting the glass, planning a route to the table, etc.) The output of the planner for the input instruction is a complete description of the actions involved, including participants, preparatory specifications, termination conditions, manner, duration, etc. Participants bring with them a list of inherent properties of the agent (e.g. agent capabilities) or physical objects (e.g., object configurations) and other characteristics , such as 'how to open' for an object such as a door. This complete description refers to a set of animation PARS which can be immediately animated. In this way, a PAR schema for the action enter may actually translate into an animation PAR for walking into a certain area. One way to differentiate between action PAR schemas and instantiated animation PARs is to consider what it is possible to motion capture 4 (by attaching sensors to a moving human figure). For example, the enter action and the put action are quite general and underspecified and could not be motion captured. However, characteristic activities such as walking and swimming could be. For further details about the animation PARs and the animation system see (Badler et al., 1999) and (Bindiganavaie et al., 2000). 4 PAR as anIL The PAR representation for an action can be seen as a general template. PAR schemas include, as part of the basic sub-categorization frame, properties of 4There are several other ways to generate motions, for example, through inverse kinematics, dynamics and key-framing. the action that can occur linguistically either as the main verb or as adjuncts to the main verb phrase. This captures problems of divergences, such as the ones described by Talmy (Talmy, 1991), for verb-framed versus satellite-framed languages. New information may come from a sentence in …