From: AAAI-94 Proceedings. Copyright © 1994, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
A Theory of Reading*
Kenneth Moorman and Ashwin Ram
Georgia Institute of Technology
College of Computing
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
{kennethm,ashwin}@cc.gatech.edu
Introduction
Reading has been studied for decades, yet no theories exist
which completely explain it. In particular, a type of knowledge intensive reading, creative reading, has been practically
ignored. Creative reading is the reading of texts which contain novel concepts. Nearly all reading will be creative to
some degree; thus, any theory which overlooks this will
By combining results from psychology,
be incomplete.
artificial intelligence, and education, we have produced a
functional theory of the complete reading process, aimed at
explaining creative reading.
Reading supertasks
In order to produce a functional theory of reading, we need
to identify the tasks which the process must perform in order to produce the desired behavior. Related tasks are then
grouped into supertasks. The supertasks presented below
are the result of functional analyses of our own reading processes, backed up by extensive prior research in the areas
of psycholinguistics
(e.g., van Dijk & Kintsch 1983), reading comprehension
(e.g., Black & Seifert 1981), story understanding (e.g., Rumelhart 1977), memory (e.g., Schank
1982), and metacognition (e.g., Flavell 1976).
Metacontrol integrates the other supertasks and includes
focus control, which manages the depth of reading; time
management; and suspension of disbelief, which enables a
reader to accept a text which violates her/his world view.
Sentence processing is responsible for low-level understanding, and includes tasks such as pronoun reference, syntactic parsing, and punctuation analysis. The story structure
understanding supertask handles story structure details, including character and setting identification, plot description, and genre identification.
The tasks making up the
scenario understander are the event parser, which identifies agents, actions, states, objects, and locations; the agent
modeler, which maintains models of the agents; and the device modeler, which forms models of objects. The explanation and reasoning supertask performs high-level reasoning
and learning through the tasks of creative understanding,
which attempts to understand novel concepts; interest man*This work was supported by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation fellowship and by the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Student Abstracts
agement; belief management, responsible for managing the
beliefs of the characters and the reader; explanation, which
builds inferences; and metareasoning, which reflects on the
reader’s own actions.
Finally, the memory management
supertask handles memory storage and retrieval.
Conclusions
Our theory is implemented in ISAAC, a system which creatively reads science fiction stories. ISAAC deals with real
stories and currently possesses the knowledge and processes
to successfully understand Men Are DifSerent (Bloch 1963),
which contains novel concepts (sentient robots, the death of
Mankind, space travel, etc.). Future work is focused on the
addition of stories, as well as exploring issues in evaluation
of both reading and creative performance.
Reading is a complex cognitive ability; through understanding the process, we gain a window into understanding
general cognition. By making extensive use of the knowledge which exists within a story and by relying on a close
interaction between the various reading supertasks, our theory is capable of modeling the reading process in a way
which allows creative reading issues to be dealt with, a
research goal not reached with earlier theories and models.
References
Black, J. B., and Seifert, C. M. 198 1. The psychological
study of story understanding.
Technical Report 18, Yale.
Bloch, A. 1963. Men Are Different. In Asimov, I., and
Conklin, G., eds., 50 Short Science Fiction Tales. New
York: MacMillan Publishing Co.
Flavell, J. H. 1976. Metacognitive aspects of problem
solving. In Resnick, L., ed., The Nature of Intelligence.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Rumelhart, D. E. 1977. Understanding and summarizing
brief stories. In Berge, D. L., and Samuels, J., eds., Basic
processes in reading and comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schank, R. 1982. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
van Dijk, T. A., and Kintsch, W. 1983. Strategies of
Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.