Discussion

  With this overview, it should now be clear that the methodology followed in this research was to break the study of the process of reading into two subareas. The first, constituting a synthesis of past reading research into the many areas that constitute reading, provides a single cohesive framework which can be used to relate research and to model the reading process to a level sufficient to allow me to properly frame a research effort. The second subarea, constituting the thesis of my work, provides a theory of one aspect of the general framework, the ability to creatively understand novel concepts. By splitting the problem in this manner, I have been able to use the framework to literally scaffold the primary research effort. The framework has allowed me to remain aware of important global issues while freeing me to concentrate on areas constrained enough to produce specific research goals and results.

The ultimate goal of my research is to produce a theory of creative reading. However, the theory alone is not enough to support the claims made--the underlying knowledge system, both the basic representation and the higher-level ontology, has to be described and defended. The representation portion of the research is inseparable from the process portion; both are presented here in support of one another. Finally, the research makes one additional contribution in the area of evaluation. Evaluation has been a traditionally difficult thing to accomplish in a principled fashion. My methodology allows me to empirically evaluate the work. The results of this evaluation then allow me to make specific claims about the sufficiency of the model, which ultimately allows to support my claims about the validity of the theory. This ability to perform the empirical evaluation is a key factor in this line of research.

In summary, the work being presented in this dissertation makes several contributions to the field:  

1.

A contribution is made at the level of describing the issues which are involved in understanding reading. This is elaborated on in Chapter 2 which describes the characteristics of the reading problem and how these characteristics affect the theory being built. Many of the characteristics were identified after a multi-discipline review of research on both reading and creativity, as this work represents the combination of the two; for details of this review, see Chapter 3.

2.

A contribution is made in the area of knowledge engineering--both the representation of concepts within a computational reasoning system and the organization of these concepts. These issues of knowledge representation and ontology are described in Chapter 4. A   functional, attribute-based representation is described which permits a wide-range of concepts to be represented and manipulated. An ontology is presented which results from both functional arguments as well as research in developmental psychology.

3.

Chapter 5 describes the contribution this research makes in the area of describing the reading process as a large of set of tasks. The contribution involves the description of the tasks, the justification for their inclusion in the theory, the organization in which they are placed, and a model which implements those tasks. Issues of communication and dependence are described with the choices made in the research defended on functional and cognitive grounds.

4.

The core contribution of the work is found in Chapter 6 which describes the specific understanding process explained by the theory, that of creative understanding. The specific tasks required, their organization, and constraints on their functioning are presented, again with theoretical decisions being defended. The theory explains one method by which novel concepts can be understood by a reasoner within a reading context.  

5.

Chapter 7 presents details of the computational model resulting from the theory. While the ISAAC system is itself a contribution, the theoretical contribution of the model is best seen in Chapter 8 which describes the evaluation performed on the theory. The research contributes in two ways to evaluation. First, the empirical evaluation which is performed is novel; the methodology promises to be a contribution to future artificial intelligence researchers. Second, the theory is evaluated on a level separate from the model instantiation, by making use of certain theory metrics from ecological psychology. The application of this approach to artificial intelligence is also a contribution to the field.

 

This list is not intended to be exhaustive nor detailed; Chapter 9 provides a more in-depth discussion of precisely what this research has accomplished and what it has contributed to the field. The chapter also draws some conclusions and looks forward to the future of this line of inquiry. But, before we can consider the future, we must consider the problem of reading in order to better understand exactly what I am proposing a theory of--the next chapter presents the characteristics of reading.