ABSTRACT
For some time we have been interested in the problems posed by uncertainty in text understanding, in particular the problem of representing and reasoning about alternative ative interpretations of natural language texts. We are concerned with problems like pronoun reference, prepositional phrase attachment, and lexical ambiguity. We are particularly interested in plan recognition as it is needed in text understanding: understanding the meanings of stories by understanding the way the actions of characters in the story serve purposes in their plans. Our work builds upon earlier work in script- and plan-based understanding of stories like that of Cullingford (1978), Wilensky (1983), Wong (1981), Charniak (1986) and Norvig (1987).
