Shadows and Headless Shadows: an Autobiographical Approach to Narrative Reasoning

The Xapagy cognitive architecture has been designed with the explicit goal of narrative reasoning: to model and mimic the activities performed by humans when witnessing, reading, recalling, narrating and talking about stories. Xapagy has been developed from scratch, which required us to revisit many of the problems identified in the classic literature of the story understanding. In particular, the Xapagy architecture takes an unusual approach to knowledge representation: the autobiographical narrative is the only source of knowledge, the autobiographical memory is the only memory model and there is no retrieval from long term into working memory. The claim made by this paper is that these design decisions, supported by the shadowing / headless shadows based reasoning mechanism, can yield a system which can successfully perform narrative reasoning. We support the claim by a detailed description of the representation and reasoning model.