Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An approach to pragmatic interpretation in natural language understanding is described. The approach trades off a full generative natural language capacity for the ability to recognize the flow of familiar (and often complex) arguments. The theory requires considerable domain-dependent knowledge and specific domain-dependent goals for the understanding system. The process model described, however, is domain-independent with fsdrly relaxed representational constraints. All processing takes plaw:e within a hierarchical episodic memory, allowing expectations to be posted to quite general concepts from multiple sources in parallel.