Direction-based text interpretation as an information access refinement

A Text-Based Intelligent System should provide more in-depth information about the con- tents of its corpus than does a standard information retrieval system, while at the same time avoiding the complexity and resource-consuming behavior of detailed text understanders. In- stead of focusing on discovering documents that pertain to some topic of interest to the user, an approach is introduced based on the criterion of directionality (e.g., Is the agent in favor of, neutral, or opposed to the event?). A method is described for coercing sentence meanings into a metaphoric model such that the only semantic interpretation needed in order to determine the directionality of a sentence is done with respect to the model. This interpretation method is designed to be an integrated component of a hybrid information access system.