An approach to pragmatic interpretation in natural language understanding is described. The approach trades off a full generative natural language capacity for the ability to recognize the flow of familiar (and often complex) arguments. The theory requires considerable domain-dependent knowledge and specific domain-dependent goals for the understanding system. The process model described, however, is domain-independent with fsdrly relaxed representational constraints. All processing takes plaw:e within a hierarchical episodic memory, allowing expectations to be posted to quite general concepts from multiple sources in parallel.

Our goal is the complete integration of natural language understanding with the rest of cognition. Two mechanisms that we have developed and implemented to achieve this goal are: (l) the Direct Memory Access Parsing (DMAP) algorithm, based on the notion of lexically-guided memory search and concept refinement, and (2) an inference-triggering process based on the notion of concept refinement failures. Together, these two mechanisms form a tightly-integrated system of parsing and inferencing, with no artificial boundaries between them.