Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Story themes are generalized advice that a story contains, and theme recognition provides a way for a system to show that it has understood the story. T H U N D E R is a story understanding system that implements a model of theme construction from belief conflicts and resolutions. A belief conflict is conflicting evaluative beliefs regarding a story character's plan. W h e n execution of the plan results in a realized success or failure for the character, a resolution to the conflict is recognized from the additional reasons that the realization provides for the evaluative beliefs in conflict. The theme of the story is generated by reasoning about how the resolution shows the beliefs in conflict to be correct or incorrect, and produces a statement of generalized advice about reasons for evaluation. T w o types of advice are generated by T H U N D E R : (1) reason advice about the reasons for evaluation that the story shows to be correct, and (2) avoidance advice about how failures that occur as the result of erroneous evaluations could be avoided. The algorithms for constructing both type of advice and examples of T H U N D E R constructing themes are presented.