Conceptual Dependency and Scripts

Conceptual Dependencies

The theory of conceptual dependency is based on the use of a limited number of primitive concepts and rules of information to represent any natural language statements. This theory states that different sentences which have the same meaning should have same unique conceptual dependency representation. The main objective is to represent the knowledge in such a way that it facilitates the drawing inferences from the sentence. It depends on the language in which the sentences were originally stated.

Conceptual Dependency was originally developed to represent knowledge which is acquired from the natural language input. The goals of this theory are:

• To help in the drawing of the inference from sentences.
• To be independent of the words which are used in the original input.
• That is to say for any two or more sentences which are identical in meaning there should be only one representation of that meaning.

Conceptual dependency provides:

• A structure into which the nodes representing the information can be placed.
• A specific set of primitives at a given level of granularity.

Scripts

They are the frame-like structure which is used to represent commonly occurring experience such as going to the movie, shopping in a supermarket, eating in a restaurant, visiting a doctor etc. Like the scripts for play the script structure is described in terms of actors, rules, props and scenes. The slots in a script which correspond to the part of the event are filled with CD primitive.

References:

1. Elaine Rich, Kevin Knight 1991, "Artificial Intelligence".
2. Nilsson, Nils J. Principles of Artificial Intelligence, Narosa Publishing House New Delhi, 1998.
3. Norvig, Peter & Russel, Stuart Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach, Prentice Hall, NJ, 1995
4. Patterson, Dan W. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, Prentice Hall of India Private Limited New Delhi, 1998.