generation of natural language text. Comprehension involves the dynamic construction of conceptual representations, linked by causal relationships and organized/indexed for subsequent retrieval. Once these conceptual representations have been created, comprehension can be tested by means of such tasks as paraphrasing, question answering, and summarization. Higher-level cognitive tasks are also modeled within the NLP paradigm and include: translation, acquisition of word meanings and concepts through reading, analysis of goals and plans in multi-agent environments (e. g. , coalition and counterplanning behavior by narrative characters), invention of novel stories, recognition of abstract themes (such as irony and hypocrisy), extraction of the moral or point of a story, and justification/refutation of beliefs through argumentation. The robustness of conceptually-based text comprehension systems is directly related to the nature and scope of the knowledge constructs applied during conceptual analysis of the text. Until recently, conceptually-based natural language systems were developed for, and applied to, the task of narrative comprehension (Dyer, 1983a; Schank and Abelson, 1977; Wilensky, 1983). These systems worked by recognizing the goals and plans of narrative characters, and. using this knowledge to build a conceptual representation of the narrative, xx UNDERSTANDING EDITORIAL TEXT including actions and intentions which must be inferred to complete the representation. A large portion of text appearing in newspapers and magazines, however, is editorial in nature.

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