A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology

Andrew S. Gordon is Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research advances technologies for automatically analyzing and generating narrative interpretations of experiences. A central aim of his research is the large-scale formalization of commonsense knowledge, and reasoning with these formalizations using logical abduction. He is the author of the 2004 book, Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge. Jerry R. Hobbs is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Professor at the University of Southern California. He has numerous publications in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, information extraction, and discourse analysis. He was editor of the book Formal Theories of the Commonsense World (1985) and author of Literature and Cognition (1990). He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics and a recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Part I. Commonsense Psychology: 1. Commonsense psychology and psychology; 2. Commonsense psychology and computers; 3. Formalizing commonsense psychology; 4. Commonsense psychology and language; Part II. Background Theories: 5. Eventualities and their structure; 6. Traditional set theory; 7. Substitution, typical elements, and instances; 8. Logic reified; 9. Functions and sequences; 10. Composite entities; 11. Defeasibility; 12. Scales; 13. Arithmetic; 14. Change of state; 15. Causality; 16. Time; 17. Event structure; 18. Space; 19. Persons; 20. Modality; Part III. Commonsense Psychology Theories: 21. Knowledge management; 22. Similarity comparisons; 23. Memory; 24. Envisioning; 25. Explanation; 26. Managing expectations; 27. Other agent reasoning; 28. Goals; 29. Goal themes; 30. Threats and threat detection; 31. Plans; 32. Goal management; 33. Execution envisionment; 34. Causes of failure; 35. Plan elements; 36. Planning modalities; 37. Planning goals; 38. Plan construction; 39. Plan adaptation; 40. Design; 41. Decisions; 42. Scheduling; 43. Monitoring; 44. Execution modalities; 45. Execution control; 46. Repetitive execution; 47. Mind-body interaction; 48. Observation of plan executions; 49. Emotions.