Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper discusses a method for representing thematic level structures, i.e. abstract plan/goal combinations. W e make the case that the processes for both recognition and construction of plans use the s a m e memory structures. In particular, w e are looking at the knowledge structures for recognizing and avoiding bad planning. The learning procedure w e describe starts by observing the bad planning behavior of narrative characters and combines old descriptions of planning errors to create new abstract structures. The learning method discussed is a one-trial, schema acquisition method, which is similar to DeJong's [DeJong 1983]. The method used involves taking schemas for planning situations that are found in an actual narrative situation, and using causal reasoning to construct a new schema which better characterizes the situation. This work is part of the M O R R I S project at U C L A [Dyer 1983a]. The planning situations are represented using Thematic Abstraction Units (TAUs) [Dyer 1983b.