10 - The Space Structuring Model

Summary

With false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by words that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and with the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions of how worlds are made, tested, and known.

– Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

This approach requires … a fundamental change in perspective, such that the contingence of action on a complex world of objects, other actors, located in space and time, is no longer treated as an extraneous problem with which the individual actor must contend, but rather is seen as the essential resource that makes knowledge possible and gives action its sense.

– Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions

We have seen that on-line meaning construction is a nontrivial process in which a speaker assembles utterance meaning in response to linguistic clues. Because meaning is considerably underdetermined by the overt structure of language, it often requires the creative application of background knowledge. The importance of background knowledge is especially obvious when the objects of analysis are stretches of connected discourse. Schank & Abelso (1977), for example, point to the somewhat surprising difficulty of constructing a computational model capable of understanding simple stories like this one:

Seana went to a restaurant.

She ordered chicken.

She left a large tip.

Although one might conceivably build a model that could construct meanings for each individual sentence, Schank & Abelson argued that such a modelwould fail to compute a number of things human readers would naturally assume to have transpired.