Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper presents a new model of on-line inference processes during text understanding. The model, called ATLAST, integrates inference processing at the lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic levels of understanding, and is consistent with the results of controlled psychological experiments. ATLAST interprets input text through the interaction of independent but communicating inference processes running in parallel. The focus of this paper is on the initial computer implementation of the ATLAST model, and some observations and issues which arise from that implementation.