Minsky 1980

Reference:

Under construction

Review

Excerpts

'A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation ... Collections of related frames are linked together into frame systems' (1).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | frame | situation |



'People have great difficulty keeping track of the faces of a six-colored cube if one makes them roll it around in their mind. If one uses more "intrinsic" relations like next-to and opposite-to, then turning the object on its side disturbs the "image" much less' (6-7).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | image | mind |



'Frames are probably never stored in long-term memory with unassigned terminal values. Instead, what really happens is that frames are stored with weakly-bound default assignments at every terminal! These manifest themselves as often-useful but sometimes counter-productive stereotypes' (11).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | memory |



Since a sentence can be assessed as grammatical but nonsensical while another may be both ungrammatical and nonsensical, 'what is involved in the recognition of sentences must be quite different from what is involved in the appreciation of meanings ... The word-order relations ... exploit the (grammatical) convention and rules people usually use to induce others to make assignments to terminals of structures' (11).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | convention | recognition | sentence | word-order |



This would lead to 'a qualitative theory of "grammatical": if the top levels are satisfied but some lower terminals are not we have a meaningless sentence; if the top is weak but the bottom solid, we can have an ungrammatical but meaningful utterance' (12).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | sentence | theory | utterance |



'Almost any event, action, change, flow of material, or even flow of information can be represented to a first approximation by a two-frame generalized event' (14).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | action | event | two-frame |



'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of "scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments, trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits, setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories, explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new, instantiated thematic frame in his own mind (16).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | construct | discourse | event | frame | listener | mind | narrative | noun | participants | plot | representation | structure | verb | word-order |



'We can now imagine the memory system as driven by two complementary needs. On one side are items demanding to be properly represented by being embedded into larger frames; on the other side are incompletely-filled frames demanding terminal assignments' (16).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | embedded | memory | system |



'It should be emphasized again that we must not expect magic. For difficult, novel problems a new representation structure will have to be constructed, and this will require application of both general and special knowledge' (18).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | knowledge | representation | structure |



'What does it mean to expect a chair? Typically, four legs, some assortment of rungs, a level seat, an upper back. One expects also certain relations between these "parts". The legs must be below the seat, the back above. The legs must be supported by the floor. The seat must be horizontal, the back vertical, and so forth. Now suppose that this description does not match; the vision system finds four legs, a level plane, but no back. The "difference" between what we expect and what we see is "too few backs". This suggests not a chair, but a table or a bench' (19).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | description | difference | floor | level | system |



Last Modified: July-12-96 10:13:13

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