Natural semantics in artificial intelligence

In one major section we discuss the imprecision, the incompleteness, the openendedness, and the uncertainty of people's knowledge. In the other major section we discuss strategies people use to make different types of deductive, negative, and functional inferences, and the way uncertainties combine in these inferences. Keywords Semantics, inference, cognitive processes, natural language processing, human memory, question-answering systems, deduction, analogy 1. Introduction In this paper we will discuss how to represent and process information in a computer in ways that are natural to people. This does not mean doing away completely with representations and procedures which computers have traditionally used, but adding new representations and procedures which they have not used. People often store and communicate imprecise, incomplete, and unquantified information; they often assert truth or falsity in relative terms; and they seldom seem to use rigorous logic in their inferential processes. Because of these conditions, people seem to have an almost infinite information processing capacity, with inference making and problem solving abilities more refined and far more flexible than any existing computer program. How can we study these human capabilities in order to make our machines show similar performance? A combination of approaches is perhaps best. Observation of people's behavior, introspection, some experimentation, protocol analysis, and synthesis of computer programs can all be valuable techniques.