Purposive Understanding

... we began to program a computer understanding system thatwould attempt to process input texts. An item crucial to our ability to accomplishthis task was what we called a script. A script is a frequently repeated causalchain of events that describes a standard situation. In understanding, when it ispossible to notice that one of these standard event chains has been initiated,then it is possible to understand predictively. That is, if we know we are in arestaurant then we can understand where an "order" fits with what we justheard, who might be ordering what from whom, what preconditions (menu,sitting down) might have preceded the "order", and what is likely to happennext. All this information comes from the restaurant script.Hayes, J.E., D. Michie, and L. I. Mikulich (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 9, Ellis Horwood.