Natural language texts often refer to complex situations. Many of these situations involve relationships between people's goals. In order to build a program that understands texts, it is necessary to give the program knowledge about goal relationships and the situations to which they give rise. This knowledge constitutes a theory of planning about real world situations. We have incorporated this theory of planning into a program called PAM (Plan Applier Mechanism). As a result we now have a natural language processing system that can comprehend many complicated dramatic situations.
['Robert Wilensky']
Understanding complex situations