A Psychology-Inspired Approach to Automated Narrative Text Comprehension

We report on an ongoing research program to develop a formal framework for automated narrative text comprehension, bringing together know-how from research in Artificial Intelligence and the Psychology of Reading and Comprehension. It uses argumentation to capture appropriate solutions to the frame, ramification, and qualification problems, and their generalizations as required for text comprehension. In this first part of the study we concentrate on the central problem of integration of the explicit information from the text narrative with the reader’s implicit commonsense world knowledge, and the associated tasks of elaboration and revision.