Textbook of AI

1946–2023, Cognitive scientist, AI researcher

Also known as: Roger C. Schank

Roger Schank was an American cognitive scientist whose 1972 paper Conceptual Dependency: A Theory of Natural Language Understanding introduced conceptual dependency theory, a language-independent representation of meaning in which every action decomposes into a small set of primitive acts (PTRANS for physical transfer, ATRANS for abstract transfer, MTRANS for mental transfer, INGEST, EXPEL, GRASP, MOVE, SPEAK, ATTEND, PROPEL, MBUILD), allowing inferences to be drawn that depend on the meaning of an utterance rather than its syntactic form.

With Robert Abelson he wrote Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (1977), introducing the script as a knowledge structure for stereotyped sequences of events: the canonical example is the restaurant script (entering, sitting, ordering, eating, paying, leaving) which supplies default expectations against which novel descriptions of restaurant visits are interpreted. Schank's group at Yale built a series of natural-language understanding systems on these foundations: SAM (Script Applier Mechanism), PAM (Plan Applier Mechanism), BORIS, IPP, FRUMP and others.

Schank moved into educational technology in the late 1980s, founding Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences and arguing , with characteristic bluntness, that mainstream schooling was a failed system. He remained an outspoken critic of the AI research establishment and, in his final years, of large-language-model approaches.