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<Paper uid="J79-1070">
  <Title>American Journal of Cornput ational Linguistics TEXT UiiDERSTANDING: A SURVEY</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The goal of this study is to examine work that has something to offer toward the construction of a computable model of text understandhg, and therefore toward cognitive models in genenil. The reason for the criterion of computability is that this rather strict requirernevt makes vague gcnernlizatiot~s i~nposisible (or at least more difficult), and forces exact specification of proccsscs being hypothesized- (However, this criterion is frequently difficult to apply, and in some instances the author s decision was undoubtedly a subject ivc one. ) It should be clearly poirltcd out that no attempt is made here to deal with the semantics of individual sentences. A familiarity with recent work in semantic representatian in cognitive psychology, linguistics and artificial intelligence is assumed (see Norman and Rumelhart [75], Schank and Colby [73] and Steinberg and Jakbbovifis [ 71 1 ) Although many problems in representing the meaning of individual sentences remain unsolved, this study focuses an those aspects of mcanlng that are conveyed only by groups of connected sentences - texts. Additionally, only work that attempts to deal with the semantics or understanding of texts, as opposed to statistical or syntactic analysis, is considered. This focus on text has also led to the omission of studies of non-textual mpmory and of computational systems that understand and solve problems stated in English or carry on dialogue. This omission is not meant. to imply that work in these areas has no relevance to text understanding, but the dif fcrent focus and additional constraints of these studies make such implications difficult to isolate.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Page 4 The study is divided into three parts, which occasionally overlap, The first section deals with the conterlt of coni~ccted text - that is, what exactly does text commtlnicate. The work in this section is primarily that of experimental psychologi~ts interested in memory and recall- The second section deals with the _strucrurq of text, apart from its specific content, This work has been done mairlly by cultural antl~ropologists and those interested in the theory of literaturc, but is also being investigated by experimental psychologists. The third section discusses computational models prop-osed by computational linguists, which include attempts to implement in computer programs some of the processes discussed in the other sections- Each section is concluded with a dlsc~~ssion of the emerging model of text understanding. Finally, some directions for needed research are suggested.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It is hoped that this kind of interdisciplinary survey will call attention of workers 112 one area to work in other areas addressing the same problems, This type of communication is valuable in two distinct ways. When similar conclusions are reached in different disciplines frequently using different methods and with somewhat different goals, these conclusians must be given special credence, On the other hand, it is sometimks the case that one discipline completely overlooks a problem or some aspect of it due to their own interests and biases. Such omissioi~s need to be brought into sharp focus.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Page S
</SectionTitle>
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    </Section>
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