ABSTRACT
During story understanding readers make value judgments—judgments of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of characters’ actions. This paper presents the representational structures and processes used to make value judgments by the computer program THUNDER. THUNDER creates evaluative beliefs about characters' plans based on a set of universal pragmatic and ethical judgment rules. To account for subjective differences in evaluative belief, THUNDER has a specific ideology to represent the idiosyncratic aspects of evaluation. There are two components in the representation of ideology: (1) a set of important, long term goals called values, and (2) a collection of planning strategies for each value. This representation for ideology allows THUNDER to reason about what is ‘good’, and what it believes to be ‘good ways to get what is good.’ The representation and rules for value judgments are used to (1) make inferences about character belief and ideology, (2) represent expectation knowledge based on personality traits, and (3) reason about the obligations that characters acquire.
