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<Paper uid="T75-1005">
  <Title>WHAT MAKES SAM RUN? SCRIPT BASED TECHNIQUES FOR QUESTION ANSWERING</Title>
  <Section position="11" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
VI. CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the area of memory organization, there is much controversy over categories of world knowledge and corresponding models of memory. At present, there is an ongoing debate concerning episodic vs. semantic memory (Tulving 72). Episodic memory emphasizes experiential knowledge of the world, while semantic memory accomodates abstractions derived from experience. It is generally conceded that people must have both episodic and semantic knowledge.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Contention arises when retrieval mechanisms are described which bias one data structure over another (Schank 74~ Ortony 75). The problem of course is which types of knowledge are used for what purposes and how.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Analysis of memory retrieval mechanisms usually proceeds along one of two routes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> On one hand, there is speculation about memory retrieval in general, without reference to things people actually do. On the other hand, there are psychological experiments which study very specific tasks that people never encounter outside of a psychological test. Neither approach has taught us much about the nature of human memory. The development of computer models has the distinct advantage of forcing us to identify and account for memory processes which people really have and use all the time.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Trying to answer whether or not the waiter gave John a menu led to the concept of focus and a heuristic for determining focus. Question answering using focus works because it is founded on recognizing what people find interesting. As people live from day to day, they experience various activities and situations. Some of these activities are more engaging than others, and some situations are more interesting than others. If we can discover a metric which assesses the relative interest-appeal of assorted human experiences, then we can use this metric to establish general focus in story understanding. Whatever metric we design will have to examine experiential data bases since the phenomenon of being interested in something is inherent in experience and cannot be derived.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> A system relying on purely semantic data will never know where to focus because the experiential element of what is interesting has been distilled out of its data base. It might be argued that perhaps a function exists which would operate on a semantic network of propositions and evaluate the focus of a statement or story. Suppose this could be done. Then what is the point of abstracting experiential data in the first place? Why develop a purely semantic conceptual representation if we re Just going to turnaround and recreate the experiential data that's been thrown away? No one is denying that people have the ability to abstract principles from experience and acquire knowledge which is not episodic in nature. We all know that most swans are white and Ancient Greece was polytheistic. The issue is a question of exactly where and how semantic knowledge is used in natural language processing. SAM has demonstrated the power of episodic memory organization in the task of story understanding and question answering. While it is certainly not true that episodic memory is goingto account for the memory organization underlying all thought processes, we are constructing models which illustrate a theory of episodic memory in language processing.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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