Story-enabled hypothetical reasoning

Story understanding is a central competence that illuminates all other aspects of human intelligence. In this work, I demonstrate how our story understanding ability sheds light on our ability to think in terms of hypothetical situations. Using the Genesis story understanding system as a substrate, I develop a story-enabled hypothetical reasoning system that models several high-level human abilities, including judging actions in terms of moral alternatives, contextualizing stories by considering what could have otherwise happened, and deliberating about personality to decide what characters will do next. In developing this system, I built many new computational mechanisms and representations, including a program for answering what-if questions, a side-by-side story comparator, rules for making presumptive inferences, heuristics for evaluating personality fit, and a problem-solving approach for evaluating moral character. Together, they take Genesis's story understanding capabilities to another level and advance our understanding of human intelligence.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Holmes, Dylan Alexander

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick H. Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111866

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111866