Processing Newspaper Stories: Some Thoughts on fighting and Stylistics

This paper explores two aspects of story understanding: (a) the representation of human motivations and intentions; (b) different stylistic mechanisms for inter-relating pairs of sentences. The former aspect is examined by attempting to represent some of the concepts necessary to understand a "fighting" episode in a short newspaper story about a civil war. The latter aspect is used to emphasize that some of the inferences necessary to understand a particular story may be guided by "structural" properties of the story which rule out certain expectations. Finally, a possible synthesis of these two aspects is suggested.