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<Paper uid="P80-1003">
  <Title>ON THE EXISTENCE OF PRIMITIVE MEANING UNITS</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="14" end_page="14" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
5. PRELIMINARY RESULTS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A primitive meaning unit, or building block, should be useful for describing a large number of different meanings. Moran attempts to identify those structures that have been useful descriptors. At a certain point in the learning process, currently arbitrarily chosen by the h.m;un trainer, Moran looks for building blocks that have been used to describe a number of different root verbs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This search for building blocks crosses CMS boundaries and occurs only when memory is rich enough for some global decisions to be made.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Moran was presented with twenty senses of four root verbs: move, throw, carry and buy. Moran chose the following effects as building blocks:  with a physical object * Since Moran has only been presented with a small number of verbs of movement, it is not surprising that the building blocks it chooses describe Agents and Objects moving about the environmen= and their interaction with each other. A possible criticism is that the chosen building blocks are artifacts of the particular descrlptions that were given to Moran. We feel this is an advantage rather than a drawback, since Moran must assume that the world is described to it on a level that will be appropriate for subsequent processing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In Schank's conceptual dependency scheme, verbs of movement are often described with PTRANS and PROPEL. ~t is interesting that some of the building blocks Moran inferred seem to be subparts of the structures of PTRANS and PROPEL. For example, the conceptual dependency for</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> where X and Y are b,,m&amp;quot;ns and Z is a physical object.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> see the object, Z, changing from the location of X to that of Y. Thus, the conceptual dependency subpart: We</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> appears to be approximated by building block ~3 where the Object changes location. Moran would recoEnize that the location change is from the location of the Agent to the location of the indirect object by the interaction of building block #3 with other buildlng blocks and effects that participate in the action description.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Similarly, the conceptual dependency for &amp;quot;X move Z to W&amp;quot; is : z&lt;~)ioc(w) where X and Z have the same restrictions as above and W is a location. Again we see an object changing location; a co,~-on occuzence in movement and a building block Moran identified.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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