Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Traditional Cognitive Science has studied various cognitive components in isolation. Our project at- tempts to alleviate some of the problems with this separation by focusing on the role of problem solv- ing in language comprehension. Specifically, the KA project integrates six areas of current investi- gation in Cognitive Science: knowledge represen- tation, m e m o r y organization, language compre- hension, knowledge acquisition, problem solving, and control architectures. W e are developing a model-based text interpretation and knowledge ac- quisition system which, when completed, will be able to read and interpret descriptions of physical devices, construct models of the devices, and use the acquired models to solve novel design prob- lems. This paper presents three areas in which we use problem solving to constrain natural language understanding: (1) the use of mental models as a foundation for both problem solving and natu- ral language understanding, (2) the use of design experience to influence the understanding process, and (3) the use of the design process to establish the cost of linguistic decisions.