Abstract

This paper describes a belief understanding system which, taking an interview-text as its input, builds a conceptual representation of a respondent's belief system concerning a given object. Central to the understanding process is the identification of the connections between the object and the believer's goals. A general scheme governing the inference-processes with respect to these object-goal relationships is presented. It is suggested that the implementation of BUS could proceed from Schank's et al Integrated Partial Parsing program. The system's behavior is illustrated by examining the processing of a fragment of an interview-text. Some implications for the study of belief systems are discussed.