Causal Reconstruction

Causal reconstruction is the task of reading a written causal description of a physical behavior, forming an internal model of the described activity, and demonstrating comprehension through question answering. T his task is difficult because written d escriptions often do not specify exactly ho...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Borchardt, Gary C.
Language:en_US
Published: 2004
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5955
Description
Summary:Causal reconstruction is the task of reading a written causal description of a physical behavior, forming an internal model of the described activity, and demonstrating comprehension through question answering. T his task is difficult because written d escriptions often do not specify exactly how r eferenced events fit together. This article (1) ch aracterizes the causal reconstruction problem, (2) presents a representation called transition space, which portrays events in terms of "transitions,'' or collections of changes expressible in everyday language, and (3) describes a program called PATHFINDER, which uses the transition space representation to perform causal reconstruction on simplified English descriptions of physical activity.