A View of the Restaurant Script Through the Lens of Hierarchical Planning

Jamie Macbeth, Mak Roberts, Boming Zhang, Sharmin Badhan, Molly Neu, Tanush Garg, Mackie Zhou, Yining Hua, Manushaqe Muco

Keywords: Automated Planning, Hierarchical Planning, Scripts, Narrative Understanding

Abstract: The flexible nature of human cognition and of the structures it uses is well known, as is the difficulty of building cognitive systems that exhibit transfer and use the same structures for radically different tasks. In this paper, we perform a close examination of Schank-Abelsonian scripts, picking apart the goal- and plan- oriented nature of low-level acts and high-level reasoning inherent in them. We then view scripts through the lens of hierarchical planning systems, and construct the well-known restaurant script as a hierarchical goal network planning domain. These are evidence in support of a claim that some, if not all, scripts are deeply hierarchical and are plan- and goal-oriented. The continuum that results from this representational unification may provide flexible knowledge structures which may be reused for a broad variety of tasks in language understanding, planning, and tasks requiring both, such as explanation and plan-based understanding of natural language.

Paper Track: Technical paper

Submission Number: 33