Recognizing Plans and Summarizing Actions

Abstract

The structural aspects of an information processing theory of how persons understand the actions of others is presented. The process described is a constructive process which uses a plan schema to recognize the plans which account for the observed actions. The logical and psychological rules of plan consistency are presented and their use in plan recognition is described. One measure of the understanding of observed actions is the ability to summarize the observations. Properties of summaries are discussed and it is shown that these properties result from the plan recognition process.