script
In plain wordsIn classic AI, a stored outline of a familiar sequence of events, such as eating at a restaurant, that helps a program understand a story by filling in what normally happens.
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Knowledge representation
A knowledge structure recording how a routine, culturally familiar episode normally unfolds: the roles of its participants (customer, waiter), its props (menu, bill), the conditions for entering it, its usual outcomes and its scenes in order. Given a story that mentions only a few events — 'Mary ordered the soup. Later she paid the bill.' — a script-based program infers the unstated ones, such as that she was seated and ate the soup, and can answer questions about them. Scripts specialize framesframe, n.: In classic AI, a ready-made template for a familiar kind of thing or event, such as a kitchen or a job interview, with blanks to fill in and sensible default values. for events and were central to Yale story-understanding programs such as SAM (Script Applier Mechanism); their brittleness on novel situations motivated later work on plans, goals and case-based reasoningcase-based reasoning, n.: Handling a new situation by finding the most similar one dealt with before and adjusting what worked then, much as a cook adapts a remembered recipe to the ingredients at hand..
The program answered 'Did Mary eat?' correctly because the restaurant script supplied the eating scene.
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Computing
A short program executed by an interpreter rather than compiled ahead of time, such as a training or evaluation script that automates a machine learningmachine learning, n.: A way of building software that learns from examples instead of following rules written by a programmer. Shown thousands of labeled photos, for instance, a program can learn to recognize cats. experiment, or a shell script that runs a data pipeline.
Origin
Introduced by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson in a 1975 IJCAI paper and developed in their book Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (1977) at Yale. Richard Cullingford's SAM (1975–1978) was the main implementation.
Related
- frameframe, n.: In classic AI, a ready-made template for a familiar kind of thing or event, such as a kitchen or a job interview, with blanks to fill in and sensible default values.
- commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match.
- knowledge representationknowledge representation, n.: The study of how to record knowledge about objects, categories, rules and events in a precise format, so that a program can reason with it and reach conclusions nobody typed in.
- semantic networksemantic network, n.: A way of storing knowledge as a web of concepts joined by labeled arrows, such as 'canary — is a — bird' and 'bird — can — fly', so a program can follow the links.
- case-based reasoningcase-based reasoning, n.: Handling a new situation by finding the most similar one dealt with before and adjusting what worked then, much as a cook adapts a remembered recipe to the ingredients at hand.
Sources
- Schank, R. C. & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mentioned in
frameframe, n.: In classic AI, a ready-made template for a familiar kind of thing or event, such as a kitchen or a job interview, with blanks to fill in and sensible default values., case-based reasoningcase-based reasoning, n.: Handling a new situation by finding the most similar one dealt with before and adjusting what worked then, much as a cook adapts a remembered recipe to the ingredients at hand., conceptual dependencyconceptual dependency, n.: A 1970s theory for representing the meaning of sentences with a small set of basic actions, so that 'John gave Mary a book' and 'Mary got a book from John' come out the same.