A study of conceptual primitive elimination: Embedding INGEST into PTRANS

In cognitive systems and cognitive linguistics, primitive decomposition systems attempt to explain cognitive phenomena by breaking things down into conceptual building blocks and provide rich and flexible representations for systems. A prime example is the Schank–Minsky Conceptual Dependency Trans-frames system, which maintains a commitment to keeping the number of primitives small and allowing them to be combined in complex ways in representing meaning, knowledge, and dynamic episodic memory. Motivated by the desire to keep the set of primitives small, this paper describes an effort to eliminate the Conceptual Dependency INGEST primitive and reconstitute its uses through combinations of the CD PTRANS primitive and CD’s representations of containment. The implementation is performed in Babel, an automated paraphrase generation system which generates English realizations of CD structures and which has been used in multiple natural language understanding and story understanding systems. The implementation combines the discrimination nets used for selecting word senses for the INGEST primitive with those for the PTRANS primitive. Once the implementation was complete, we also ran Babel using the new structures to generate paraphrases of CD structures and to determine the degree of success in our primitive re-expression endeavor.