The Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed Perception
Hypothesis
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Winston, Patrick. "The Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed
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The Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed Perception Hypothesis
Patrick Henry Winston
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139
Abstract
argues for a multiplicity of ways of thinking coupled into
a reasoning hierarchy with instinctive reactions on the lowest level and self-conscious reflection on the highest level
(Minsky 2006). Brooks argues that whatever human intelligence is, studying it directly is beyond the state of the art,
and we must instead organize systems in layers of competence, starting with the objective of understanding low-level
layers that produce insect-level intelligence (Brooks 1991).
Still others, in many seminal papers, have suggested that
the right way is, for example, through architectural design
(Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom 1987), neural mimicry (McClelland & Rumelhart 1989), or statistical methods (Pearl
1988).
Each of these approaches has made important contributions, especially from an engineering perspective, but none
has shown us light at the end of the tunnel, not yet at least.
What is missing, I think, is an approach centered on asking what exactly makes humans different from other primates and from early versions of ourselves. For guidance, I
ask about the early history of our species, and I find provocative suggestions in the speculations of paleoanthropologists,
especially those of Tattersall (Tattersall 1998).
Basically, Tattersall believes we are symbolic and other
primates were not and are not. He says we were not symbolic either, until about 50,000–70,000 years ago. Before
that, we were structurally rather modern for perhaps 100,000
years, but during that earlier 100,000 years, like the Neanderthals, all we could do was make simple stone tools and
work with fire.
Then, we started making art, and eventually produced
the drilled seashell jewelry found in the Blombos Cave, the
cave paintings at Lascaux, and the figurines at Brassempouy.
Such art, Tattersall believes, requires symbolic thinking and
its appearance is evidence of becoming symbolic.
Tattersall argues that we became symbolic rather suddenly, probably in southern Africa, possibly in a population
reduced to a few thousand or a few hundred individuals. It
was not a matter of slowly growing ability proportional to
slowly growing brain size. More likely, it was a evolutionary
accident, with nonlinear effects, that unleashed the power of
other faculties previously evolved by selection for benefits
other than producing human-level intelligence.
Of course, saying we are symbolic does not take us very
far toward a computational theory. Chomsky, who fre-
I ask why humans are smarter than other primates, and I hypothesize that an important part of the answer lies in what
I call the Strong Story Hypothesis, which holds that story
telling and understanding have a central role in human intelligence.
Next, I introduce another hypothesis, the Directed Perception
Hypothesis, which holds that we derive much of our commonsense, including the commonsense required in story understanding, by deploying our perceptual apparatus on real
and imagined events.
Then, after discussing methodology, I describe the representations and methods embodied in the Genesis system,
a story-understanding system that analyzes stories ranging
from précis of Shakespeare’s plots to descriptions of conflicts
in cyberspace.
The Genesis system works with short story summaries, provided in English, together with low-level commonsense rules
and higher-level reflection patterns, likewise expressed in English. Using only a small collection of commonsense rules
and reflection patterns, Genesis demonstrates several storyunderstanding capabilities, such as determining that both
Macbeth and the 2007 Russia-Estonia Cyberwar involve revenge, even though neither the word revenge nor any of its
synonyms are mentioned.
Finally, I describe Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System, a
system that recognizes activities such as approaching, jumping, and giving, and answers commonsense questions posed
by Genesis.
The Right Way
Just about everyone agrees that much has been accomplished
since Turing published his seminal paper, Computer Machinery and Intelligence (Turing 1950). On the other hand,
most would also agree that less has been accomplished than
expected. Although applications of Artificial Intelligence
are everywhere, we still do not have a computational theory
of human intelligence. A team of dedicated first-class engineers can build systems that defeat skilled adults at chess
and Jeopardy, but no one can build a system that exhibits the
commonsense of a child.
What has been tried? Turing argued that human intelligence is a matter of complex symbolic reasoning. Minsky
1
symbol-processing faculties to our visual faculties whenever
the problem is easier to solve over on the visual side.
We often do not have to draw a picture, however, because
imagination is enough. Consider this simple statement–
question example: “John kissed Mary. Did John touch
Mary?” Everyone seems to answer the question by deploying visual processes on an imagined kiss. Once that is done
once, the action-consequence knowledge can be cached as a
rule, but being able to get the commonsense answer through
perception means you can answer the question, when asked,
even if you have not had any sort of kissing education.
Here is a more complex example from personal experience. As a friend helped me install a table saw, he said, “You
should never wear gloves when you use this saw.” At first, I
was mystified, then it occurred to me that a glove could get
caught in the blade. No further explanation was needed because I could imagine what would follow. It did not feel like
any sort of formal reasoning. It did not feel like I would have
to have the message reinforced before it sank in. It feels like
I witnessed a grisly event of a sort no one has ever told me
about. I learned from a one-shot surrogate experience; I told
myself a story about something I have never witnessed; and
I will have the commonsense to never wear gloves when I
operate a table saw.
From such examples, I posit the Directed Perception Hypothesis:
quently cites Tattersall, takes us further by suggesting that
we are unique in our ability to combine two concepts to
make a third without limit and without disturbing the contributing two (Chomsky 2008). To a linguist, this sounds
like the merge operation, central to minimalist theories of
language.
The Hypotheses
I propose to take Chomsky’s hypothesis a step further. I
believe that the merge operation gave us the ability to describe events; that we developed the ability to string event
descriptions into stories; that we further developed an ability to move backward and forward in remembered stories
to explain and predict; that our story processing ability
came to include the ability to combine stories into new stories never previously witnessed, from which imagination
emerged. Thinking about this kind of thinking has led me
to posit the Strong Story Hypothesis:
The Strong Story Hypothesis: The mechanisms that
enable humans to tell, understand, and recombine stories separate human intelligence from that of other primates.
Why are stories so important? Because human education is
full of stories, starting in modern times with the fairy tales of
childhood, through the lessons of history, literature, and religious texts, and on to the cases studied in law, medicine,
business, engineering, and science, complemented by the
stories told to us by our parents, siblings, and peers. Even
learning to follow a recipe when we learn a skill can be
viewed as a special case of story understanding.
The pioneering natural-language work of Roger Schank
(Schank 1972) presumed that stories are important. Here,
with the Strong Story Hypothesis I hypothesize that story
understanding is not just important, but rather that story understanding is the centrally important foundation for all human thinking.
Given that story understanding is centrally important, the
next question is: Where does the commonsense knowledge
needed to understand a story come from? We humans do
not get it from the web or from manually built commonsense databases, and even without a desire to understand
what makes us different from other primates, depending on
the web or other sources of commonsense data is ill advised,
because we know a lot we have never been told nor are likely
to be told nor are likely to find written down anywhere.
I believe we generate much of what we know as needed,
via the interaction of our symbolic and perceptual systems.
Sometimes our symbolic system drives our vision system to
engage itself on information in the physical world; sometimes our symbolic system drives our visual system to engage itself on an imagined world.
I believe my point of view is well aligned with the work
of Ullman on visual routines (Ullman 1996), which in turn
was inspired by many psychophysical studies, all of which
suggest that our human vision system is a powerful problem solver, not just an input channel. Accordingly, it is
natural to draw a picture and move a problem from our
The Directed Perception Hypothesis: The mechanisms that enable humans to direct the resources of
their perceptual systems to answer questions about real
and imagined events account for much of commonsense knowledge.
Thus, I believe our inner language enables not only story
manipulation but also the marshalling of our perceptual systems, especially our vision perception system, to solve problems on our behalf and produce symbolically cached commonsense rules.
Finally, I believe the Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed Perception Hypothesis are inseparable, and one without the other loses much of its appeal. Without connection to perception, story understanding reduces to disconnected symbol manipulation by a system that may appear
to be quite intelligent, but depends too exclusively on linguistically supplied knowledge. Without connection to story
understanding, an otherwise capable perception system can
initiate reflex action, but lacks the ability to chain events together, to move backward and forward in such chains, to
explain, and to predict.
Genesis
The Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed Perception
Hypothesis are not the whole story, but I believe they are a
sufficiently important part of the story to deserve a great deal
of research.
I believe that the research should be conducted by looping through the following steps: identify a competence to be
understood; formulate a computational problem; propose a
computational solution; develop an exploratory implementation; and crystalize emergent principles. These steps are
2
to thought provoking, none of which have explicit answers
in the stories themselves:
reminiscent of the methodological-step recommendations of
Marr (Marr 1982). The rest of this section illustrates how
the steps have guided my research program on story understanding.
Who ends up dead?
Why did Macduff kill Macbeth?
Do the stories involve revenge?
Which story presents a Pyrrhic victory?
Is there a Macbeth role in the Russo-Estonia cyberwar?
Is Russia’s alleged attack on Estonia’s computer networks
an instance of revenge or teaching a lesson?
Step 1: Competence
What is the competence to be understood? I take it to be that
of analyzing stories, such as the following rendering of the
plot from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Macbeth: Macbeth, Macduff, Lady Macbeth, and
Duncan are persons. Macbeth is a thane and Macduff
is a thane. Lady Macbeth, who is Macbeth’s wife, is
greedy. Duncan, who is Macduff’s friend, is the king,
and Macbeth is Duncan’s successor. Macbeth defeated
a rebel. Witches had visions and talked with Macbeth. The witches made predictions. Duncan became
happy because Macbeth defeated the rebel. Duncan rewarded Macbeth because Duncan became happy. Lady
Macbeth, who is Macbeth’s wife, wants to become the
queen. Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to want to
become the king. Macbeth murders Duncan. Then,
Lady Macbeth kills herself. Dunsinane is a castle and
Burnham Wood is a forest. Burnham Wood came to
Dunsinane. Macduff had unusual birth. Macduff fights
with Macbeth and kills him. The predictions came true.
Step 2: Computational problems
The first computational question is: What representations
make it possible to answer questions posed in story understanding? Certainly, knowledge will have to be represented,
for without a representation, there can be no model, and
without a model, there can be no understanding or explanation.
We could just use some sort of semantic net as a universal
representation covering everything, but we felt it would be
instructive to see what kinds of knowledge are needed in
story understanding, how much of each kind is needed, and
how often each kind of knowledge is put to use. Also, we
were guided by the principle that refined description tends
to expose regularity and constraint.
Regularity and constraint are important, of course, because a model that supports story understanding must involve commonsense and the ability to reflect on the implications of commonsense. This leads to the second computational problem: how do we represent and exploit commonsense and reflective knowledge.
I have used simple plot summaries from Shakespeare as
anvils on which to hammer out ideas since my earliest work
on analogy (Winston 1980). My students and I still use them
in our latest, much advanced work because they are easily
understood and because they are rich in universally important factors such as power, emotion, consequence, and ties
between people. We have found that the same kind of commonsense rules and reflection patterns that work for Shakespeare also work for international conflict, such as the alleged 2007 Russian cyberattack on Estonia’s network infrastructure:
Step 3: Posited solutions
With a view toward building an exploratory system with the
ability to answer questions about stories, my students and
I—the Genesis Group— anticipated we would need many
representations to deal with many kinds of characteristics,
relations, and events to be described.
We started with explicit representations for categories
whose importance is self evident: class, because what you
are determines what you can do (Vaina & Greenblatt 1979);
transition, because human reasoning seems to focus on
how change causes change (Borchardt 1994), and trajectory, path, and place, because movement along paths is extraordinarily common in language (Schank 1972; Jackendoff
1985).
Next, as we discovered representational needs in exploratory implementation work, we added representations
for dealing with coercion (Talmy 1988), cause, goal, persuasion, belief, mood, possession, job, social relations, and
time. Then, we added property and role-frame representations as catch-all portmanteaus.
Example sentences leading to the use of our representations are shown in the following list. We anticipate adding
other representations as the need emerges.
Cyberwar: Estonia and Russia are countries. Computer networks are artifacts. Estonia insulted Russia
because Estonia relocated a war memorial. Someone
attacked Estonia’s computer networks after Estonia insulted Russia. The attack on Estonia’s computer networks included the jamming of web sites. The jamming of web sites showed that someone did not respect
Estonia. Estonia created a center to study computer security. Estonia believed other states would support the
center.
Macbeth and Cyberwar are representative in length and sophistication of the two dozen stories on which we have focused our attention. Of course, two dozen is a small number,
but remember that our ultimate purpose is to understand human understanding, not to engineer systems that only give
the appearance of understanding by processing web-sized
story sets in ways that shed little light, if any, on human understanding.
What do we mean by understanding. After reading stories
such as Macbeth and Cyberwar, everyone has the competence to answer questions like these, ranging from obvious
• Class: A thane is a kind of noble.
• Job: Duncan was the king.
3
• Social relation: Lady Macbeth was Macbeth’s wife.
the Start Parser into a system that translates from English
into descriptions in Genesis’s inner language.
We also chose to use WordNet (Fellbaum 1998) as a
source of classification information. We sometimes augment
WordNet with information in English as in “A thane is a kind
of noble.”
With our Start Parser-enabled translator, we readily express the needed if–then rules in English. Flexibility illustrating examples follow, exactly as provided to Genesis.
• Property: Lady Macbeth was greedy.
• If X kills Y, then Y becomes dead.
• Possession: The witches had visions.
• If X harmed Y and Y is Z’s friend, then X harmed Z.
• Mood: Macbeth became happy.
• Time: Then, Lady Macbeth killed herself.
• X wanted to become king because Y persuaded X to want
to become king.
• Trajectory, path, and place: Burnham Wood came to Dunsinane.
• Henry may want to kill James because Henry is angry at
James.
Genesis also has a representation for commonsense if–
then rules, for much of story understanding seems to be
routine inference making, as knowing that if someone kills
someone else, then the someone else is dead. Such rules
connect explicit events in the story text with inferred events
to form what we decided to call an elaboration graph.
Commonsense rule chaining seems necessary but not sufficient for story analysis, because higher-level reflection
seems to require search. Revenge, for example, is a harm
event leading to a second harm event with the actors reversed, possibly with a long chain of intermediate events.
I refer to such descriptions as reflection patterns. Genesis
deploys them using breadth-first search in the elaboration
graph. This type of analysis is very different in detail, but
inspired by the pioneering work of Lehnert (Lehnert 1981).
Collectively, all our representations constitute Genesis’s
inner language. The representations in the inner language
have come to enable description of just the sorts of concepts
that would be important for survival, particularly classification, movement in the physical world, relationships in the
social world, and various kinds of causation. Perhaps something like Genesis’s inner language may eventually shed
light on the inner language with which we humans describe
the world.
• If James becomes dead, then James cannot become unhappy.
• Transition: Macbeth became the king.
• Goal: Macbeth wanted to become the king.
• Role frame: Macbeth murdered Duncan.
• Cause: Macbeth murdered Duncan because Macbeth wanted to
become the king.
• Persuasion: Lady Macbeth persuaded Macbeth to want to become the king.
As the examples show, rules can be expressed as if–
then sentences or because sentences, with or without regular
names, and possibly with the modifiers may or cannot. May
marks rules that are used only if an explanation is sought
and no other explanation is evident. Cannot marks rules that
act as censors, shutting off inferences that would otherwise
be made. In the example, we do not become unhappy when
we are dead, even though killing involves harm and harm
otherwise causes the harmed to become unhappy.
Reflection-pattern descriptions are a bit more complicated. Here are two versions of revenge.
• Revenge 1: X and Y are entities. X’s harming Y leads to
Y’s harming X.
• Revenge 2: X and Y are entities. X’s harming Y leads to
Y’s wanting to harm X. Y’s wanting to harm X leads to
Y’s harming X.
Which is the right version? That, of course, depends on
the thinker, so we are able to model specific thinkers by including more or less sophisticated or more or less biased
ways of looking at the world.
Genesis reports data about how much each representation
is used in the stories read. For example, in working with
three Shakespeare plots (Macbeth, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar) and three conflict descriptions (Russia vs. Estonia, Russia vs. Georgia, and North Korea vs. Japan), we found the
distribution of representations shown in Table 1. Of course,
because the sample size is small, the result is anecdotal, but
useful perhaps as a guide to development. We were a little surprised to see only one explicit trajectory, generated
by “Birnham wood came to Dunsinane,” which leads us to
speculate that, at the story level, few such trajectories appear; and we were surprised to see role frames, generated
by sentences such as “Macbeth murdered Duncan,” in such
abundance, leading us to think about subdividing the category. We were not surprised, however, to see many transitions, because many of the commonsense rules produce
transitions to new states, as in If X kills Y, then Y becomes
dead.
Step 4: Exploratory implementation
With computational problems specified and posited solutions in hand, we set out to develop the exploratory Genesis
system.
As a design principle, we decided that all knowledge provided to Genesis—including stories, if-then rules, and reflection patterns—would be provided in English. We were
motivated by our debugging philosophy and by the permanence of English; we knew that were we to start over, at least
our knowledge base would be reusable.
Given our English-only decision, we had to choose a
means to get from English to descriptions couched in our
representation suite. Having tried a popular statistical parser,
we eventually choose to use the Start Parser, developed over
a 25-year period by Boris Katz and his students (Katz 1997),
because the Start Parser produces a semantic net, rather than
a parse tree, which made it much easier for us to incorporate
4
Fraction in three
Shakespeare plots
33%
15%
9%
10%
5%
4%
2%
5%
1%
3%
2%
1%
Reflection pattern
Read Test
Role frame
Transition
Property
Social relation
Mood
Goal
Possession
Time
Belief
Job
Samples
About
Persuasion
TrajectoryNext
which makes Macbeth happy, but then the murder leads to
Macbeth’s own death.
Fraction in three
Cyberwar summaries
30%
12%
9%
7%
8%
6%
7%
1%
4%
1%
1%
0%Run
System options
Story telling options
Debugging switches
Macbeth
murders
Duncan
Macbeth
harms
Duncan
Macbeth
harms
Macduff
Macbeth
angers
Macduff
Duncan
rewards
Macbeth
Macbeth
becomes
happy
Duncan
becomes
dead
Macbeth
becomes
king
Lady Macbeth
becomes the
queen
Macbeth
becomes
dead
Macduff kills
Macbeth
Macduff
harms
Macbeth
Macduff
Lady Macbeth
Analysis
Analysis
Success
Answered pra...
Commonsense rules: 16
Leadership ac...
Reflection specifications: 14
Pyrrhic victory
Explicit statements: 33
Suicide
Revenge
Commonsense inferences: 16
Success
Story elements
Elaboration graph
Ans
Commonsense rules: 16
10:31:06 EDT 29-Aug-2011
Figure 2: Genesis’s story understanding system uses the
elaboration graph, together with reflection patterns, to augment the explicit knowledge provided in the story and sim||| Views Controls Start viewer Experts Elaboration graph Sources Results Onsets Precedent recall Story viewer
ple inferences generated
using commonsense187rules. Here,
6
Class 211 Trajector
Path 6 Place 6 Transitio
Transfer Cause318 Go
Genesis discovers a Pyrrhic victory, shown in dark gray.
||| Views Controls Start viewer Experts Elaboration graph Sources Results Onsets Precedent recall Story viewer
Actions
Macbeth
wants to
become king
Deprecated switches
Table 1: Various
representationsTestoccur
with varying freHamlet
suite
graphsDune
of six stories in two doEstonia (2)quency in the elaboration
Caesar
Estonia/Georgia
Macbeth
Erase text
mains, Shakespeare
and Cyberwar.
thing
...
vegetation
forest
name
burnham_wood
Estonia
prediction
conjuction
kill
go
dunsinane
at
harm
appear
roles
macbeth
9
45 Mood 77 Part
86 Possess
40 Job
Persuatio
Coercion
Belief connection,
There
is an interesting
I think, withProperty
the work
Korea/Japen
Macbeth (2)
Load disambiguating events
macduff
macb
of Minsky (Minsky 2006). He develops a theory ofbirth
thinking
unusual
birth
Korea/Japan-Estonia/Russia
Hamlet/Caesar)
Load visual events
with six layers:
instinctive
reactions,
learned
reactions,
de86 Time
22
556
Lost in Translation
video story
Purge WordNet
cache produces the
Social
Role frame
Equipped withDemo
commonsense
rules,
Genesis
liberative thinking,
reflectiveComparison
thinking, self-reflective
think- Image
Loop
Demo sample story
Purge Start cache
elaboration graph of predictions and explanations shown in
actor: predictions
ing, and self-conscious reflection. The production
of the
Load precedents
Demo simulator
Connect Co57
figure 1. The white
boxes correspond
to elements explicit in
elaboration graph using commonsense rules seems to me
the text; the gray boxes correspond to commonsense infer- Expertsreminiscent of what happens in the bottom three layers. The
Controls
ences. Note that, according to the connections in the graph,
search for higher-level concepts seems to me reminiscent of
Macduff killed Macbeth because Macbeth angered Macduff.
what happens in the reflective-thinking layer.
Fortunately, we do not always kill the people who anger us,
For a more contemporary example, Genesis finds revenge
||| Views Controls Start viewer Experts Elaboration graph Sources Results Onsets Precedent recall Story viewer
but in the story, as given, there is no other explanation, so
in the elaboration graph produced from a description of the
Genesis inserts the connection, believing it to be plausible.
alleged
Russian
on300Estonia’s
20 40 60 80 100120140160180200220240260280300320340360380400420440460480500520540560580600620640660680700720740760780800
20 40 60
80 100120140cyberattack
160180200220240260280
32034036038040network
04204404604805infrastruc0052054056058060062064066068070072074
ture, as shown in figure 3.
reward
duncan
persuade
lady_macbeth
28277: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name lady_macbeth
want
28274: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name duncan
macbeth
roles
object
appear
position
macbeth
28283: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name macbeth
28835: thing position
28743: thing object
28836: action transition appear
28742: thing roles
28784: action goal desire want
28704: features processed, thing entity abstraction relation possession transferred-property ou
28789: action change affect influence carry persuade, action induce persuade
friend
macduff
28280: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name macduff
duncan
28274: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name duncan
28566: thing social relation friend
10:44:41 EDT 29-Aug-2011
Read Test Samples
About
Next
Run
||| Views Controls Start viewer Experts Elaboration graph Sources Results Onsets Precedent recall Story viewer
Actions
System options
Story telling options
Debugging switches
||| Views
Controls Start viewer
thing
...
artifact
artifacts
name
computer_netwo
Hamlet
Test suite
Estonia (2)
Caesar
Dune
Estonia/Georgia
Macbeth
Erase text
Korea/Japen
Macbeth (2)
Load disambiguating events
Korea/Japan-Estonia/Russia
Hamlet/Caesar)
Load visual events
Lost in Translation
Demo video story
Purge WordNet cache
Loop
Demo sample story
Purge Start cache
Load precedents
Demo simulator
Connect Co57
Elaboration graph Sources
6 Path
Class 247 Trajector
Deprecated switches
Estonia
Experts
go
6
Place
dunsinane
9
Persuatio
Coercion Belief
6
at
63
Results Onsets Precedent recall
appear
Mood
93
russia
Part
lady_macbeth
28277: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name lady_macbeth
34752: thing entity abstraction group social-group organization unit political-unit state country name estonia
want
support
macbeth
states
other
states
35551: features other, thing entity physical-entity object location region district administrative-district state states, thing entity abstraction attribute state states, thing entity abstraction gr
appear
position
roles
object
28835: thing position
35586: thing object
35585: thing roles
28836: action transition appear
35552: features processed will, thing entity abstraction psychological-feature event act activity aid support, thing entity abstraction psychological-feature cognition cognitive-factor determi
28784: action goal desire want
28789: action change affect influence carry persuade, action induce persuade
35549: action think evaluate believes-event accept believe, action think evaluate believe, action think evaluate expect believe, action think evaluate accept believe trust credit
Social
101
Time
24
i
Duncan
rewards
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
becomes
dead
Duncan is
king
Macbeth
murders
Duncan
Macbeth
becomes
happy
Macbeth
harms
Duncan
Duncan
becomes
dead
Macbeth
harms
Macduff
Macbeth
becomes
king
Macbeth
angers
Macduff
Lady Macbeth
becomes the
queen
Macduff kills
Macbeth
||| Views
Macbeth
becomes
dead
20
40
Controls Start viewer
60
80
100
Experts
120
140
Elaboration graph Sources
160
180
Estonia
doesn't
respect Russia
Macduff
becomes
unhappy
Lady
Macbeth
harms herself
Duncan is
Macduff's
friend
200
220
estonia
34851: thing social relation friend
Results Onsets Precedent recall
240
260
280
300
Story viewer
Lady Macbeth
persuades
320 Macbeth
340
360
380
to want
Estonia
relocates war
memorial
Estonia
insults
Russia
Russia wants
itself to harm
Estonia
Russia wants
itself to damage
computer
Duncan is
networks
Estonia believes
that computer
networks are
valuable
Russia
becomes
happy
Estonia owns
Analysis
Revenge
Commonsense rules: 19
Macbeth is
Duncan's
successor
99
ruler
Experts
to become king
Macduff
harms
Macbeth
xx
actor: states
34794: thing entity physical-entity matter substance chemical-element iodine name i, thing entity abstraction measure definite-quantity number integer
34752: thing entity abstraction group social-group organization unit political-unit state country name estonia
Macbeth
wants to
become king
estonia
computer_n...
Comparison Role frame719 Image
friend
Controls
Lady Macbeth
persuades
Macbeth to want
to become king
180
damage
99
51
Property
Possess
Job
believe
estonia
persuade
Story viewer
204 Transfer Cause394 Goal
Transitio
Elaboration graph
Reflection specifications: 13
400
Macbeth
wants
420
440 to 460
become king
murders
500
520
540
Duncan
Lady Estonia Macbeth
Macbeth kills
harms becomes
herself
happy
Russia
Macduff kills
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
becomes
dead
rewards
Macbeth
harms herself
king
Macbeth isn't
sane
Duncan is
Macduff's
friend
Russia wants
Success
Explicit statements: 13
Macbeth
480
Story elements: 39
Lady Macbeth
isn't sane
becomes
580
600
620
dead
Estonia
Macbeth
harms
angers
Duncan
Russia
Macbeth
640
660becomes
680
700
king
720
740
Macbeth
angers
760
780
Macduff
800
MacbethRussia
Lady Macbeth
harms
the
angersbecomes
queen
Macduff
Estonia
Macduff
becomes
Russia
attacks
Estonia
Estonia unhappy
becomes
unhappy
Russia wants
Macbeth
itself to attack
becomes
computer dead
networks
Russia
harms
Estonia
Russia
harms Me
Macduff
harms
Macbeth
Russia
Russia attacks
computer
Duncan
networks
Lady Macbeth
Answered prayer
Commonsense inferences: 26
Duncan
560
Angrily acting in revenge
Reflection characterizations: 4
Figure 3: The commonsense rules and reflection patterns
honed on Macbeth have broad application. Here, the alleged Russian cyberattack on Estonia reveals an instance of
revenge, shown in dark gray.
Macduff isn't
sane
Duncan
becomes
happy
Macbeth is
Duncan's
successor
Lady
Macbeth kills
herself
Duncan
becomes
happy
Lady Macbeth
is Macbeth's
wife
Lady Macbeth
is Macbeth's
wife
Genesis not only finds revenge, it looks for the acts of
harm
involved, then uses WordNet to find the most related
Analysis
Analysis
FigureAnswered
1: Genesis’s
story understanding
systemSuicide
produces anRevenge acts inSuccess
what the Answered
political
scientists
call
the Goldstein
indexInsane viol...
Success
pra...
Leadership ac...
Pyrrhic victory
...
Leadership...
Insane viol...
Insane viol...
graph
from14 commonsense
together
with
(Goldstein
which
enables13it to
characterize
the re- inferences: 18
Commonsenseelaboration
rules: 16
Reflection
specifications:
Explicit statements: 33 rules
Commonsense
inferences:
16 aStory elements
Commonsense1992),
rules: 16
Reflection specifications:
Explicit
statements: 33
Commonsense
Elaboration graph
story. White boxes indicate information given explicitly in
venge in Macbeth as a tit-for-tat, while the revenge in the
the Macbeth story. Gray boxes indicate information proRussian cyberattack on Estonia is an escalation.
duced by commonsense rules.
We have also done some preliminary work on using reflection patterns, such as parallel revenge patterns to help
align story elements in preparation for analogical reasoning
Given the elaboration graph, Genesis is ready to look for
(Winston 1980; Forbus & Gentner 1989; Gentner & Markhigher-level concepts of the sort we humans would see in
man 1997).
the story but only if we reflect on what we read. Genesis
sees, for example, not only Revenge but also a Pyrrhic vicTo take Genesis to a higher level, we have arranged for
tory in the elaboration graph for Macbeth shown in figure 2:
the simultaneous reading of stories by two separate perMacbeth wants to be king, murders Duncan to become king,
sona, which we jocularly call Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
5
Suic
Story
Estonia (2)
Caesar
Dune
Estonia/Georgia
Macbeth
Erase text
Korea/Japen
Macbeth (2)
Load disambiguating events
Korea/Japan-Estonia/Russia
Hamlet/Caesar)
Load visual events
Lost in Translation
Demo video story
Purge WordNet cache
Loop
Demo sample story
Purge Start cache
Load precedents
Demo simulator
Connect Co57
russia
6
Persuatio
CoercionBelief
42
Mood
62
Part
lady_macbeth
15828: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name lady_macbeth
states
other
22570: thing entity abstraction group social-group organization unit political-unit state country name estonia
want
support
macbeth
states
23586: features other, thing entity physical-entity object location region district administrative-district state states, thing entity abstraction attribute state states, thing entity abstraction gr
appear
position
roles
object
23621: thing object
16386: thing position
16387: action transition appear
23620: thing roles
23587: features processed will, thing entity abstraction psychological-feature event act activity aid support, thing entity abstraction psychological-feature cognition cognitive-factor determi
16335: action goal desire want
16340: action change affect influence carry persuade, action induce persuade
23584: action think evaluate believes-event accept believe, action think evaluate believe, action think evaluate expect believe, action think evaluate accept believe trust credit
Social
67
Time
16
xx
66
ruler
Comparison Role frame480 Image
i
actor: states
22574: thing entity physical-entity matter substance chemical-element iodine name i, thing entity abstraction measure definite-quantity number integ
estonia
22570: thing entity abstraction group social-group organization unit political-unit state country name estonia
22598: thing social relation friend
Experts
Controls Start viewer
Experts
Elaboration graph Sources
Results Onsets
Precedent recall
Story viewer
20 40 60 80 100120140160180200220240260280300320340360380400420440460480500520540560580600620640660680700720740760780800
Estonia doesn't
respect Russia
Equipped with overlapping but slightly different points of
view, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde see things differently.
In figure 4, for example, Dr. Jekyll concludes that Macduff kills Macbeth in an act of insane violence; Mr. Hyde
sees revenge. Both read the same story, but Dr. Jekyll thinks
the only reason you would kill someone is that you are insane. Mr. Hyde looks for a reason, and then sees anger.
Dr. Jeckll has this rule:
estonia
computer_n...
friend
Controls
||| Views
damage
66 Possess
34 Job
Property
believe
estonia
persuade
Estonia
relocates war
memorial
Estonia
insults
Russia
Estonia believes
that computer
networks are
valuable
Someone
harms
Estonia
Estonia
harms
Russia
Estonia
angers
Russia
Russia wants
itself to harm
Estonia
Russia
becomes
unhappy
Estonia owns
computer
networks
Russia wants
itself to damage
computer
networks
Russia attacks
computer
networks
Russia
attacks
Estonia
Russia
becomes
happy
Russia wants
itself to attack
computer
networks
Russia
harms
Estonia
20 40 60 80 100120140160180200220240260280300320340360380400420440460480500520540560580600620640660680700720740760780800
Estonia doesn't
respect Russia
Russia wants
itself to attack
Estonia
Estonia builds
computer
networks
Estonia
relocates war
memorial
Estonia
insults
Russia
Estonia
harms
Russia
Estonia
angers
Russia
Russia
angers
Estonia
Russia wants
itself to harm
Estonia
Russia wants
itself to damage
computer
networks
Russia attacks
computer
networks
Russia
attacks
Estonia
Estonia
becomes
unhappy
Estonia believes
computer
networks are
valuable
Russia
becomes
happy
Russia wants
itself to attack
computer
networks
Estonia owns
computer
networks
Russia wants
itself to attack
Estonia
Russia
becomes
unhappy
Someone
harms
Estonia
Estonia
harms Me
Reflection specifications: 13
Explicit statements: 12
Estonia doesn't
respect Russia
Estonia wants
itself to harm
Russia
Estonia
becomes
happy
Estonia wants
itself to attack
Russia
Russia
harms
Estonia
Estonia builds
computer
networks
Someone
attacks
computer
networks
Someone
attacks
computer
networks
Russia doesn't
respect
Estonia
Russia doesn't
respect
Estonia
Estonia is
my friend
Russia is my
friend
Estonia
harms
Russia
Analysis
Analysis
Revenge
Commonsense rules: 19
Success
Reflection specifications: 13
Explicit statements: 12
Answered prayer
Commonsense inferences: 26
Story elements
Teaching a lesson
Commonsense rules: 19
Success
Answered prayer
Commonsense inferences: 26
Story elements
Elaboration graph
• Henry may want to kill James because Henry is angry at
James.
Figure 5: The proper label for the Russia-Estonia cyberattack depends on your point of view. One person’s revenge is
another person’s teaching a lesson.
Mr. Hyde has another:
• James may kill Henry because James is not sane.
10:34:22 EDT 29-Aug-2011
Read Test Samples
About
Social psychologists would say that Dr. Jekyll behaves situationally, more Asian in outlook, because he looks for a situation that has caused a person to do a terrible thing, whereas
Mr. Hyde behaves dispositionally, more Western in outlook,
because he attributes terrible actions to the characteristics of
the actor (Morris & Peng 1994).
Next
Actions
System options
Story telling options
Debugging switches
||| Views
Controls Start viewer
thing
...
vegetation
forest
name
burnham_wood
Hamlet
Test suite
Estonia (2)
Caesar
Dune
Estonia/Georgia
Macbeth
Erase text
Korea/Japen
Macbeth (2)
Load disambiguating events
Korea/Japan-Estonia/Russia
Hamlet/Caesar)
Load visual events
Lost in Translation
Demo video story
Purge WordNet cache
Loop
Demo sample story
Purge Start cache
Load precedents
Demo simulator
Connect Co57
Experts
Elaboration graph Sources
6 Path
Class 211 Trajector
Deprecated switches
Estonia
Place
6
6
Results Onsets Precedent recall
Story viewer
187 Transfer Cause318 Goal
Transitio
137
prediction
conjuction
kill
go
dunsinane
9
Persuatio
Coercion Belief
at
Mood
45
appear
77
harm
roles
macbeth
Part
lady_macbeth
28277: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name lady_macbeth
want
birth
unusual
28274: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name duncan
macbeth
roles
appear
position
object
macbeth
28283: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name macbeth
28835: thing position
28743: thing object
28742: thing roles
28784: action goal desire want
28704: features processed, thing entity abstraction relation possession transferred-property ou
28789: action change affect influence carry persuade, action induce persuade
Social
86
Time
22
appear
86
40
Property
Possess
Job
reward
duncan
persuade
28836: action transition appear
macduff
birth
98
macbeth
king
Comparison Role frame556 Image
friend
macduff
actor: predictions
28280: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name macduff
duncan
28274: thing entity physical-entity object whole living-thing organism person name duncan
28566: thing social relation friend
Controls
||| Views
Genesis’s ability to answer a variety of questions about the
stories it reads, yet Genesis does its work using only about
two dozen commonsense rules and another dozen reflective
patterns, several of which, revenge in particular, arose frequently in our experiments, as shown in table 2.
Run
||| Views Controls Start viewer Experts Elaboration graph Sources Results Onsets Precedent recall Story viewer
Experts
Controls Start viewer
Experts
Elaboration graph Sources
Results Onsets Precedent recall
Story viewer
20 40 60 80 100120140160180200220240260280300320340360380400420440460480500520540560580600620640660680700720740760780800
20 40 60 80 100120140160180200220240260280300320340360380400420440460480500520540560580600620640660680700720740760780800
Duncan is
king
Macbeth
harms
Duncan
Macbeth
harms
Macduff
Macbeth
angers
Macduff
Duncan
ecomes
dead
Macbeth
becomes
king
Lady Macbeth
becomes the
queen
Macbeth
becomes
dead
Macduff kills
Macbeth
Macduff
harms
Macbeth
Macduff
becomes
unhappy
Macduff kills
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
becomes
dead
Duncan
rewards
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth
harms herself
Macbeth isn't
sane
Macbeth
becomes
dead
Duncan is
Macduff's
friend
Macduff
harms
Macbeth
Reflection pattern
Revenge
Answered prayer
Success
Suicide
Leadership achieved
Pyrrhic victory
Lady Macbeth
isn't sane
Macduff isn't
sane
Analysis
Success
Commonsense rules: 16
Instances in three
Shakespeare plots
4
2
1
4
1
1
Instances in three
cyberwar summaries
4
2
1
0
0
0
Analysis
Answered pra...
Leadership ac...
Reflection specifications: 14
Pyrrhic victory
Explicit statements: 33
Suicide
Commonsense inferences: 16
Revenge
Story elements: 4
Success
Answered ...
Commonsense rules: 16
Leadership...
Reflection specifications: 13
Insane viol...
Insane viol...
Explicit statements: 33
Insane viol...
Commonsense inferences: 18
Suicide
Story elements: 5
Elaboration graph
Table 2: Some reflection patterns recur frequently; others
are infrequent.
Figure 4: Opinions differ according to culture. One person’s
act of legitimate revenge is another person’s act of insane
violence.
Figure 5 shows another example, an example in which
Dr. Jekyll sees the alleged Russian cyberattack on Estonia
as an act of revenge, because Dr. Jekyll considers Estonia
an ally. Mr. Hyde, on the other hand, considers himself an
ally of Russia, so the alleged Russian cyberattack is seen as
a well-deserved teaching-a-lesson reaction. It is a matter of
whose side you are on according to the reflection patterns
used in this experiment:
What is next
• Revenge: X and Y are entities. X is my ally. X’s harming
Y leads to Y’s harming X.
• Teaching a lesson: X and Y are entities. Y is my ally. X’s
harming Y leads to Y’s harming X.
Unconstrained use of language
Our work on Genesis has stimulated a great deal of thinking
about what to do next, including thoughts about psychological experiments. Here, we report on some areas we think are
particularly ripe for technical development, listed from less
difficult to more difficult.
Although we take it as a design constraint that all knowledge
shall be in English, our English digestion capability requires
us to write simple English. On sufficiently complex sentences, statistical parsers produce defective parses and the
Start Parser fails to parse. Moreover, unconstrained English
presents problems that lie beyond parsing, such as anaphora
resolution.
One way around the simple-English constraint, conceived
and developed by Finlayson, lies in what he calls the Story
Workbench (Finlayson 2008), a kind of integrated development environment for preprocessing stories. The Story
Workbench uses automatic methods together with human
annotators who help the automatic methods over the hard
parts and supply a measure of interpretation (Finlayson
2008).
Step 5: Emergent Principles
At this early stage, it would be a stretch to say principles
have emerged. Nevertheless, there have been encouragements and mild surprises.
We were encouraged by the ability of Genesis to work
with stories of many types, including not only Shakespeare
and conflict in cyberspace, but also simply written fairy
tales, law cases, medical cases, and science fiction.
We were surprised that so little knowledge was needed
to produce credible performance. Genesis exhibits some
characteristics of human story understanding evidenced by
6
Automatic discovery of rules and patterns
At the moment, Genesis’s education is direct: we provide all
the commonsense rules and all the reflection patterns either
directly (in lists) or indirectly (embedded in instructional
stories). Of course, humans likewise learn a great deal by
being told, but sometimes we form our own commonsense
rules and discover and name our own reflection patterns. We
want Genesis to do that, too.
On the reflection-pattern level, Finlayson demonstrates
how to discover reflection patterns automatically in ensembles of culture-defining stories (Finlayson 2010).
Figure 6: Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System system has
learned to recognize jump and other actions from a few examples of each. The trained system recognizes that the student is jumping, as indicated by the lighted bar.
Adding bulldozer computing to understanding
Systems such as IBM’s Deep Blue chess player and IBM’s
Watson Jeopardy contestant demonstrate what can be done
by approaching a sufficiently narrow problem with a combination of extremely impressive engineering and massive
bulldozer-like computing power. The huge success of such
systems has focused a great deal of attention on seeing what
can be done by exploiting previously unthinkable quantities
of data now readily available on the Internet.
Our work on Genesis has the opposite polarity. We aim to
see how little knowledge Genesis needs to reach interesting,
humanlike conclusions.
Eventually, we must somehow bring the two approaches
together, exploiting large amounts of knowledge with humanlike finesse. This is the hardest problem we face.
memory and reading the answers off of the recalled video
using previously learned visual routines.
Suppose, for example, you say that a student gave a ball
to another student, and then ask if the other student took the
ball. Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System system solves
the problem using visual routines that read the answer off a
stored, then-recalled scene. Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning
System recalls the scene shown in figure 7 because, when
analyzed visually, the give bar lights up. Then, it answers
the take question by noting that the same scene lights up the
take bar as well.
Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System
What are the steps involved in addressing the second hypothesis, the Directed Perception Hypothesis? Here the situation
is less clear, and I have proportionately less to say. For the
moment, even though researchers have worked on image and
event understanding for more than half a century, kissing and
table-saw operation are too hard to work on now. We can,
however, take a big step toward such capabilities by developing systems with the competence to recognize actions such
as jump and bounce, approach and leave, throw and catch,
drop and pick up, and give and take.
To recognize such events, Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System exploits ideas on visual attention (Rao 1998).
For each video frame, Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System focuses its attention on the most rapidly moving of the
three objects, and computes characteristics of that focal object, such as speed, direction, contact with other objects. In
early versions, Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System identified actions, such as the jump shown in figure 6, by executing visual routines consisting of manually prepared patterns
of attention shift, relative movement, and contact. In later
versions, Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System learned the
patterns from supervised training examples. Now, efforts
are underway to learn action patterns from a combination of
unsupervised learning, which identifies common patterns in
unlabeled video, and supervised learning, which looks for
those common patterns in labeled video (Correa 2011).
We have demonstrated, although not regularly, that we
can ask Genesis to ask Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System to answer a question by recalling a video recording from
Figure 7: Genesis’s language system recalls a situation in
which one student gives a ball to another. Because the Rao’s
Visio-Spatial Reasoning System system sees a take in the
same sequence, Genesis’s language system notes that give
and take co-occur.
Contributions
I first hypothesized that language is important because language enables description, which enables story telling; that
story telling is central to education and cultural understanding; and that surrogate experience, in the form of stories,
greatly influences culture.
I then hypothesized that language plays a central role in
marshalling the resources of our vision system; that language stimulates visual imagination; and that vision is a major problem-solving resource.
Thus, the principal contributions of this paper are the articulation of the Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed
Perception Hypothesis:
7
• The Strong Story Hypothesis: The mechanisms that enable humans to tell, understand, and recombine stories
separate human intelligence from that of other primates.
Finlayson, M. A. 2008. Collecting semantics in the wild:
The story workbench, in naturally inspired artificial intelligence. In Beal Jacob, Paul Bello, N. C. M. C., and Winston,
P., eds., Technical Report FS-08-06, Papers from the AAAI
Fall Symposium, 46–53. AAAI Press.
Finlayson, M. A. 2010. Learning narrative morphologies
from annotated folktales. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automated Motif Discovery in Cultural
Heritage and Scientific Communication Texts.
Forbus, K. D., and Gentner, D. 1989. The structure mapping engine: Algorithm and examples. Artificial Intelligence
41(1):1–63.
Gentner, D., and Markman, A. B. 1997. Structure mapping
in analogy and similarity. American Psychologist 52(1):45–
56.
Goldstein, J. 1992. A conflict-cooperation scale for WEIS
events data. Journal of Conflict Resolution 36(2):369–385.
Jackendoff, R. 1985. Semantics and Cognition. MIT Press.
Katz, B. 1997. Annotating the world wide web using natural
language. In Proceedings of the 5th RIAO Conference on
Computer Assisted Information Searching on the Internet,
136–159.
Laird, J. E.; Newell, A.; and Rosenbloom, P. 1987. SOAR:
An architecture for general intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 33(1):1–64.
Lehnert, W. 1981. Plot units and narrative summarization.
Cognitive Science 5(4):293–331.
Marr, D. 1982. Vision. Freeman.
McClelland, J. L., and Rumelhart, D. E. 1989. Explorations
in Parallel Distributed Processing. The MIT Press.
Minsky, M. 2006. The Emotion Machine. Simon and Schuster.
Morris, M. W., and Peng, K. 1994. Culture and cause:
American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
67(6):949–971.
Pearl, J. 1988. Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: networks of plausible inference. Morgan Kaufmann.
Rao, S. 1998. Visual Routines and Attention. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT.
Schank, R. C. 1972. Conceptual dependency: A theory
of natural language understanding. Cognitive Psychology
3(4):552–631.
Talmy, L. 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition.
Cognitive Science 12(1):49–100.
Tattersall, I. 1998. Becoming Human. Harcourt.
Turing, A. M. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence.
Mind 59(236):433–460.
Ullman, S. 1996. High-Level Vision. MIT Press.
Vaina, L. M., and Greenblatt, R. 1979. The use of thread
memory in amnesic aphasia and concept learning. Working
Paper 195, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Winston, P. H. 1980. Learning and reasoning by analogy.
Communications of the ACM 23(12):689–703.
• The Directed Perception Hypothesis: The mechanisms
that enable humans to direct the resources of their perceptual systems to answer questions about real and imagined
events account for much of commonsense knowledge.
These two hypotheses are inseparable. They come together
in another hypothesis:
• The Inner Language Hypothesis: Human intelligence
is enabled by a symbolic inner language faculty whose
mechanisms support both story understanding and the
querying of perceptual systems.
The Genesis system and Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System are examples of systems built to explore the Inner Language Hypothesis. Those of us who have built the Genesis
system and Rao’s Visio-Spatial Reasoning System believe
we have contributed the following:
• We conceived a research program centered on the Inner
Language Hypothesis and the supporting Strong Story
Hypothesis and Directed Perception Hypothesis.
• We built a vision system that recognizes human activities
such as approaching, jumping, and giving.
• We built a story understanding system with both low-level
commonsense and higher-level reflective knowledge, all
provided in English.
• We explained how our story understanding system finds
concepts such as revenge in stories that never mention the
word revenge or any of its synonyms.
• We showed how to produce cultural variation in story interpretation through modifications of commonsense and
reflective knowledge.
Acknowledgements
This paper was greatly improved by adjustments suggested
by Mark Finlayson and anonymous reviewers. The research
was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation
(IIS-0413206), the Office of Naval Research (N00014-09-10597), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (A955005-1-0321), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (FA8750-10-1-0076).
References
Borchardt, G. 1994. Thinking Between the Lines. MIT Press.
Brooks, R. 1991. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47(1-3):139–159.
Chomsky, N. 2008. Some simple evo devo theses: how true
might they be for language? evolution of human language:
the Morris symposium. Unpublished manuscript.
Correa, T. L. 2011. A model for transition-based visiospatial
pattern recognition. Master’s thesis, MIT.
Fellbaum, C., ed. 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical
Database. MIT Press.
8