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Systems

Frames and Scripts

Two other popular knowledge representation formalisms are frames and scripts.
Although these were developed independently (both originating in the early 1970s), and
are different in important ways, they have sufficient similarities to be considered
together. One influential proponent of frame-based systems is Marvin Minsky (1975); a
champion of script-based systems is Roger Schank (see Schank and Abelson, 1977). The
key idea involved in both frames and scripts is that our knowledge of concepts, events,
and situations is organized around expectations of key features of those situations.

Consider a stereotypical situation, such as going to hear a lecture. One's knowledge of

what might go on during such an event is based on assumptions. For instance, it can be
assumed that the person who actually delivers the lecture is likely to be identical with the
person advertised; that the lecturer's actual time of arrival is not more than a few minutes
after the advertised start; that the duration of the lecture is unlikely to exceed an hour and
a half at the maximum; and so on. These and other expectations can be encoded in a
generic `lecture frame' to be modified by what actually occurs during a specific lecture.
This frame will include various slots, where specific values can be entered to describe the
occasion under discussion. For example, a lecture frame may include slots for `room
location', `start time', `finish time', and so on (see figure 3.2).

[IMAGE ]
Figure 3.2: Frames for `Sussex AI lecture' and `Computers and Thought lecture'.

Some of these slots may have default settings, or ranges within which actual values are
likely to be found. For instance, in figure 3.2 the `room location' slot is associated with a
list of the rooms used for AI lectures, and, in the `default' slot, the room normally used.
Slots in one frame may contain reference to other frames, so linking them together into
frame systems. Frames may also contain procedures, often called demons, which are
activated under prescribed circumstances. In figure 3.2, the identity of the speaker at a
particular lecture can be established by an `if needed' demon, which, given a location and
a start time, can consult a lecture schedule to retrieve the speaker's name. Another kind of
demon (`if added') is activated when the value of a particular slot is changed.

Schank and his co-workers have elaborated a technique for reducing a story or a
newspaper report to conceptual primitives and their interrelations. The conceptual
primitives specify certain basic actions that people and objects can perform -- for
instance, transferring a physical thing from one location to another; transferring a mental
idea from one mind to another; building new information from old; grasping objects;
focussing attention of a sense-organ on some occurrence; ingesting some form of
nourishment; and so on. Schank showed how complex representations of the meaning of
individual sentences could plausibly be built up from these conceptual primitives.
To represent a narrative composed of a series of linked sentences Schank proposed using
frame-like structures, called scripts, which record the normal sequence of events for a
given type of occurrence. Figure 3.3 shows a simplified `lecture script'.

[IMAGE ]
Figure 3.3: A simplified lecture script.

Each event in a script can be expressed as conceptual primitives. A system with such a
script will find it relatively easy to make sense of a narrative where a particular episode is
described in only partial or fragmentary terms. Moreover, it will be relatively easy to
describe unusual events, in terms of the expectations set up by the script. In a much-cited
example, the SAM program, developed by Schank and Abelson, was provided with a
brief story along the following lines:

Joe went to a restaurant. Joe ordered a hamburger. When the hamburger came, it was
burnt to a crisp. Joe stormed out without paying.

The system was able to infer that Joe had not eaten the hamburger, even though no
explicit mention was made of what he did and did not eat in the restaurant. Indeed, the
system could explain its reasoning by referring to the ways in which the events described
in the story failed to match up to the standard restaurant script (See chapter 5 of Schank
and Riesbeck, 1980).

Frames and scripts offer extremely rich and versatile methods for representing organized
clusters of knowledge about everyday or specialized occurrences. They reproduce a
powerful feature of our own thinking processes: the fact that our understanding of new
situations is often driven by stereotypes, which can be applied in a rough-and-ready way,
avoiding the need for extensive inferential processes in order to build up an
understanding from scratch. Often our initial attempts to make sense of a situation are
quite inappropriate, and we have to make improvisations and revisions as we go along.
Frame and script systems are able to incorporate such flexibility.

There are many other approaches to the representation of knowledge in a computer, and
there is much controversy about which represents the `best' general framework -- in
particular, about whether a `neat', logic-based approach, or some more informal, `scruffy'
approach such as those embodied in semantic networks, or scripts or frames is to be
preferred. This is a particularly acute problem when one is articulating commonsense
knowledge (for example, ``An object in motion generally slows down unless it is
propelled or is going downhill''). This knowledge that we all have about the usual
behaviour of physical objects in the world around us is known as naive physics. Should
we represent our commonsense assumptions as a set of logical axioms, or in terms of a
more rough-and-ready conceptual scheme? This is a critical issue within AI. Obviously
the way one reacts depends at least partly on whether one's concern is primarily to use AI
to build versatile machines or to model human thinking processes. Fortunately, however,
we do not have to take a stand on the issue in this book.
It is now time to turn from these fundamental questions of methodology toward the
mechanics of representing knowledge. Later in this chapter we shall examine a particular
AI program in order to see how different kinds of knowledge can be articulated and
linked together. We shall show that even the representation of relatively simple kinds of
knowledge involves quite complex data-structures. Before we do this, however, it is
worth saying a little in general about the importance of internal representation, for this is
something which newcomers to AI (and even the occasional oldcomer) may easily
underestimate.

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