Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a model for reading instructions. The basic framework is that an agent engages in an activity and resorts to using instructions only when "all else fails". That is, by reading the instructions during the period of engagement, the meaning of the instructions can be clarified by feedback from the world. This model has been implemented in a computer program, IIMP. IIMP is the instruction reading component of FLOABN (Alterman et al., 1991), an integrated architecture whose domain is reasoning about the usage of mechanical and electronic devices.