Reading has been studied for decades by a variety of cognitive disciplines, yet no theories exist which sufficiently describe and explain how people accomplish the complete task of reading real-world texts. In particular, a type of knowledge intensive reading known as creative reading has been largely ignored by the past research. W e argue that creative reading is an aspect of practically all reading experiences; as a result, any theory which overlooks this will be insufficient. W e have built on results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and education in order to produce a functional theory of the complete reading process. The overall framework describes the set of tasks necessary for reading to be performed. Within this framework, we have developed a theory of creative reading. The theory is implemented in the ISAAC (Integrated Story Analysis And Creativity) system, a reading system which reads science fiction stories.

Successful creative understanding requires that a reasoner be able to manipulate known concepts in order to understand novel ones. A major problem arises, however, when one considers exactly how these manipulations are to be bounded. If a bound is imposed which is too loose, the reasoner is likely to create bizarre understandings rather than useful creative ones. On the other hand, if the bound is too tight, the reasoner will not have the flexibility needed to deal with a wide range of creative understanding experiences. Our approach is to make use of a principled ontology as one source of reasonable bounding. This allows our creative understanding theory to have good explanatory power about the process while allowing the computer implementation of the theory (the ISAAC system) to be flexible without being bizarre in the task domain of reading science fiction short stories.