Policy problems like “What should we do about global warming?” are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to evaluate policy options, (b) whether constructing d...

New text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories of interest from large collections of text. We introduce a conceptual framework for making causal inferences with discovered measures as a treatment or outcome. Our framework enables researchers to discover high-dimensional textual interventions and...

Because characters’ goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6and 8-year-old children’s goal inference making processes through think-aloud protocol...

Although it has been consistently shown that readers generate bridging inferences during story comprehension, little is currently known about the neural substrates involved when people generate inferences and how these substrates shift with factors that facilitate or impede inferences, such as whether inferences are highly predictable or unpredictable. In the current study, functional magnetic ...

The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior—traits (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986; Winter & Uleman, 1984). The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as one s intentions and goals. Evidence fro...

This paper presents a new open text word sense disambiguation method that combines the use of logical inferences with PageRank-style algorithms applied on graphs extracted from natural language documents. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm on several senseannotated texts, and show that it consistently outperforms the accuracy of other previously proposed knowledge-based word sen...

The analysis of a document image to derive a symbolic description of its structure and contents involves using spatial domain knowledge to classify the different printed blocks (e.g., text paragraphs), group them into logical units (e.g., newspaper stories), and determine the reading order of the text blocks within each unit. These steps describe the conversion of the physical structure of a do...

In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and inference-making ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis, 1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, wh...

This paper proposes a system of mapping classes of syntactic structures as instruments for automatic text understanding. The system illustrated in Japanese consists of a set of verb classes and information on mapping them together with noun phrases, tense and aspect. The system. having information on direction of possible inferences between the verb classes with information on tense and aspect,...