KNOWLEDGE-REPRESENTATION GUIDELINES

1. Your final report should include:

   • A copy of your text, including a full and correct reference to the source.

   • The syntax and semantics of the knowledge representation language you are using. This is very important! (See McDermott's Fallacy, below, for more information.)

   • Your representation of the text.

   • Your representation of the background knowledge needed to fully understand the text.

   The last two items should be annotated with discussion of difficulties, your reasons for various choices you had to make, etc.

   Also, please be careful to distinguish between the text itself and the background knowledge.

   The report itself should be in the form of a conference-style paper (and not just a list of the 4 items above).

   If you are using this project to satisfy the CSE requirements for an MS project, you must also follow the guidelines in the Grad Handbook, Sect. 3.2.3.

2. If you are using SNePS, then you only need to provide syntax and semantics for case frames that are not in the Case Frame Dictionary.

   But you should provide a reference to the Case Frame Dictionary for the others, for the sake of completeness.

3. If you are doing a hospital discharge summary, then, if you differ from Kevin Stevens's case frames (which it's OK to do!), then you must say why.

4. McDermott's Fallacy: Calling something a "hospitaldischargesummary" (e.g.) doesn't make it a hospital discharge summary.

   Similarly, saying that the semantic interpretation of

   (assert parent i class j)

   is that [[i]] is a parent of [[j]] (see below) does not suffice; you also need to explain what being a parent means, which you would do with background-knowledge rules.

   Note: Not providing the syntax and semantics of your representations (because you assume the reader can figure it out using "pretend-it's-English" semantics) is a version of McDermott's Fallacy.

5. Double space your final report! (See my Writing Guidelines.)

6. Try to maintain the "use-mention" distinction: In
   (assert agent i act j object k)

   i is a node (that's syntax); it represents an agent (that's semantics). The agent that it represents (or means) is [[i]] (an entity in the domain of interpretation). So, [[i]] performs [[j]] with respect to [[k]]. But i itself doesn't perform anything.

7. PLEASE RETURN YOUR PROGRESS REPORT WITH YOUR FINAL PAPER

8. PLEASE SEE ME DURING MY OFFICE HOURS (OR BY APPOINTMENT) IF YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO LOOK AT FURTHER PROGRESS REPORTS OR IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS.