---
title: "Understanding Complex Situations"
authors:
  - "Robert Wilensky"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/210"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/0210.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1979
pages: ""
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Understanding Complex Situations

Robert Wilensky

*Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*.

## Abstract

Natural language texts often refer to complex situations. Many of these situations involve relationsh ips between people's goals. In order to build a program that understands texts, it is necessary to give the program knowledge about goal relationships and the situations to which they give rise. This knowledge constitutes a theory of planning about real world situations. We have incorporated this theory of planning into a program called PAM (Plan Applier Mechanism). As a result we now have a natural language processing system that can comprehend many complicated dramatic situations.