A logical framework for modeling a discourse from the point of view of the agents involved in It

Abstract

The way people interpret a discourse in real life goes well beyond the traditional semantic interpretation based on predicate calculus as is currently done in approaches such as Sowa's Conceptual Graph Theory, Kamp's DRT. From a cognitive point of view, understanding a story is not a mere process of identifying truth conditions of a series of sentences, but i s a construction process of building several partial models such as a model of the environment in which the story takes place, a model of mental attitudes for each character and a model of the verbal interactions taking place in the story. Based on this cognitive basis, we propose a logical framework differentiating three components in an agent's mental model: a temporal model which simulates an agent's experience of the passing of time; the agent's memory model which records the explicit mental attitudes the agent is aware of and the agent's attentional model containing the knowledge structures that the agent manipulates in its current situation.

An extended version of this paper can be found in reference [11]. This research is sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada and FCAR. My apologies to the reviewers because I could not answer all their questions in such a short paper.