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<Paper uid="T78-1027">
  <Title>WITH A SPOON IN HAND THIS MUST BE THE EATING FRAME</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="187" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Understanding every day discourse requires making inferences from a very large base of common sense knowledge. To avoid death by combinatorial explosion our computer must be able to access the knowledge it needs without irrelevant knowledge getting in its way. A plausible constraint on the knowledge we might use at a given point in a story or conversation (I shall henceforth simply assume we are dealing with a story) is to restrict consideration to that portion of our knowledge which is &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; things which have been mentioned in the discourse. So if we have a story which mentions trains and train stations, we will not use our knowledge of, say. circuses. This requires, of course, that given a topic, such as trains, or eating, we must be able to access its knowledge without going through everything we know. Hence we are lead in a natural way to something approaching a notion of &amp;quot;frame&amp;quot; (Minsky 1975): a collection of knowledge about a single stereotyped situation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In the above discussion however I have made a rather important slight of hand. Given a story we only want to consider those frames &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; things in the story. How is it that we decide which frames qualify? I was able to gloss over this because in most situations the problem, at least at a surface level, does not appear all that difficult. If the story is about trains, it will surely mention trains. So we see the word &amp;quot;train&amp;quot;, and we assume that trains are relevant. What could be easier.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Unfortunately, this ease is deceptive for the story may mention many topics of which only a few are truely important to the story. For example: The lawyer took a cab to the restaurant near the university.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Here we have &amp;quot;lawyer&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;cab&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;restaurant&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;university&amp;quot; all of which are calling for our attention. Somehow on the basis of later lines we must weed out those which our only incidental.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> But a more immediate difficulty are those situations where a story deals with a well defined topic, yet never explicitly mentions it. So consider : The woman waved as the man on the stage sawed her in half.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Here we have no difficulty in guessing that this is a magic trick, although nothing of the sort has been mentioned. We are able to take &amp;quot;low level&amp;quot; facts concerning sawing, stages, ete and put them together in a higher level &amp;quot;magician&amp;quot; hypothesis. As such, the phenomena illustrated here is essentlaly bottom up.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Of course, any time we try to infer relatively global properties from more local evidence we may make mistakes. That this creates problems in frame determination is shown by the nice example of Collins et. al. (fortheomming).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (To get the full import of the example, try pausing briefly after each sentence.) He plunked down $5 at the window. She tried to give him $2.50 but he refused to take it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> So when they got inside she bought him a large bag of popcorn.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> The first line is uniformly interpreted as a buying act (most even going further and assaming something like a bet at a racetrack). The second line is then seen as a return of change, but the refusal is problematic. The third line resolves all of this by suggesting a date at the movies - a considerable revision of the initial hypothesis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> To sumarize the last few paragraphs, the problem of frame determination in language comprehension involves three sub-problems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> I) Stories will typically elude to many higher frames, any of which might serve as the context for the incoming lines. How do we choose between them? 2) The words used in a story may not directly indicate the proper higher frame. How do we do the bottom up processing to find it? 3) If we are lead astray in the course of (2), how do we correct ourselves on the basis of further evidence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> In the paper which follows I will be primarily concentrate on (2) with (3) being mentioned occasionally. In essence my position on (I) is that it will not be too much of a problem, provided that the cost of setting up a context like &amp;quot;restaurant&amp;quot; is small. If it is never used then as the story goes on it will receeded into the background. How this &amp;quot;receeding&amp;quot; takes place I shall not say, since for one thing it is a problem in many areas, and for another, I don't kno w.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13">  Concerning (2) and (3); we will be lead to a position similar to that of Minsky (1975) and Collins et. al (forthcomming) in that a frame will be selected on the basis of local evidence, and corrections will be made if it proves necessary. We will see however, that there are still a lot of problems with this position which do not at first glance meet the eye.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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