Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the course of understanding a text, a succession of decision points arise at which readers are faced with the task of choosing among alternative possible interpretations of what they're reading. Careful analysis of a wide range of sample texts reveals that such decisions are often based on complex evaluations of the interpretation being constructed, and sometimes cause the reader to construct and discard a number of intermediate inferences before settling on a final interpretation for a text. This paper describes Judgmental Inference theory as a proposed scheme of evaluation metrics and mechanisms, derived from examination of inference decisions arising during text understanding. A series of programs, ARTHUR, MACARTHUR and JUDGE are briefly described, which incorporate some of the metrics and mechanians of Judgmental Inference, enabling then to inderstand texts more conplex than those that can be handled by other understanding systems.