An Active Frame for the Knowledge Representation

This paper describes micro-actors which construct the knowledge representation in which the modularity was established without sacrificing the interaction. The behavior of the micro-actor is defined in terms of only one kind of action: sending message to another micro-actor. The micro-actor is composed of a script and an acquaintance. The script consists of the pairs of the message pattern and the action corresponding to the pattern. The micro-actor has the acquaintance as a memory space to hold the data and the names of the other micro-actors it directly knows about. As a result of using the micro-actors, we can deal with knowledge about the actions as well as knowledge about the world states. The information about an action sent from a micro -actor is effective only in the micro-actor which received it. This guarantees the modularity of micro-actors. An example shows that the continuation in a message make both the subroutine control and the coroutine control possible. The other indicates a dialogue in the question-answering system using the micro-actors.