On the Interpretation of Natural Language Instructions

In this paper, we discuss the approach we take to the interpretation of instructions. Instructions describe actions related to each other and to other goals the agent may have; our claim is that the agent must actively compute the actions that s/he has to perform, not simply "extract" their descriptions from the input.We will start by discussing some inferences that are necessary to understand instructions, and we will draw some conclusions about action representation formalisms and inference processes. We will discuss our approach, which includes an action representation formalism based on Conceptual Structures [Jac90], and the construction of the structure of the agent's intentions. We will conclude with an example that shows why such representations help us in analyzing instructions.