Narrative understanding requires the use of large amounts of generic knowledge about word meanings, the world, and narrative structure. Such knowledge is typically unreliable ("defeasible"), and raises difficult representational problems. The aim of this research is to develop a direct, natural, formally interpretable representation for this kind of knowledge, taking English formulations of the knowledge as an initial representation, and translating systematically (ultimately, automatically) into the formal representation. Certain classes of English generic sentences can already be mapped directly into the logic, but the research will greatly expand these classes, allowing virtually any generalization expressible in English to be directly formalized. The result will be not only theoretical insights into the nature of unreliable general knowledge, but also further development of an extensible narrative understanding system, whose general knowledge base can be expanded through English input.
