Accommodating context change

Abstract

Two independent mechanisms of context change have been discussed separately in the literature - context change by entity introduction and context change by event simulation. Here we discuss their integration. The effectiveness of the integration depends in part on a representation of events that captures people's uncertainty about their outcome - in particular, people's incomplete expectations about the changes effected by events. We propose such a representation and a process of accommodation that makes use of it, and discuss our initial implementation of these ideas.