[Reading] Tell Me a Story, Chapter 4: Indexing Stories

I found the interesting comparison between the two analysis examples of goals, results, lessons, and so on that Schank gave in the beginning in this chapter:

"Trying to prove yourself may cause you to do things you don't want to so you can appear cool"
Topic: group acceptance | Goal: appear cool | Actual Results: feel lousy | Lesson: Be yourself

"Sometimes you act irrationally in a group when you wouldn't if you were alone"
Topic: group acceptance | Goal: appear cool | Actual Results: feel lousy | Lesson: Be yourself

There are still many other examples that he shown in this chapter, but these are the two sharing exactly the same topic, goal, result, and lesson - but the natural language expressions (and even the stories referred by the natural language expressions) of the knowledge are totally different!!!

Other interesting cited sentences are:

"...the indices for retrieving a story would be exactly thosethat were used to represent it. In this way, we could be reminded of a new story by an old story simply by storing the new story in terms of the same elements we have used to understand both stories, namely the themes, goals, plans, and such that characterized what was going on in each story."

"[To ascertain the themes being discussed] depends upon, among otherthings, the themes prevalent in the life of the hearer. You cannot understand very well what you neither know about nor have any experience of. The primary problem in understanding someone else's story, then, is determining the theme that is being implicitly discussed."

"One thing that we have seen is that indexing is an idiosyncratic affair: One person's indices are not another's. We are reminded of what we are reminded of...clearly a given story has no right index. Nevertheless, a right way to compute indices - that is, a vocabulary and method of construction - is common to us all. We construct different indices because what we pay attention to and what we know of the world are different, because the stories that we have already processsed are different, not because our indexing schemes are different in principle."

"Thus, a given story in our memory can have many possible labels, and a given event in the outside world can cause us to construct many possible labels."

"What we need to express these kinds of sentences is a language that would render them identically"

"Real stories are remembered because they have lessons that are derived from them that serve as indices to memory. Without a lesson, we have difficulty remembering something.... retrieving the story in a domain-independent way would be impossible...in order to get reminded of a story independent of the surface features of the current topic, the lesson provides the central part of the index."

"before you can find a good story to tell, you need to know the nature of the conversation and the ideas you have to contribute. The story is simply what happened - the goals and plans and results. The index is what surrounds the story - what reminds you of the story and what you want to add to it. Thus, an index has two parts. Something said in conversation brings an observation to mind."

"My claim is that storytelling strongly reflects inelligence. Telling a good story at the right time is a hallmark of intelligence."

"But we probably would not want to grant it real intelligence until it had made up those indices for itself. No one teaches us how to index, after all. We make up our own way of seeing the world, following generally accepted parameters, of course. Intelligence implies the creation and use of indices."