Abstract

Artificial agents, which are embedded in a virtual world, need to interpret a sequence of commands given to them adequately, considering the temporal structure for each command. In this paper, we start with the semantics of natural language and classify the temporal structures of various eventualities into such aspectual classes as action, process, and event. In order to formalize these temporal structures, we adopt Arrow Logic. This logic specifies the domain for the valuation of a sentence as an arrow. We can connect, or give order to, arrows by defining inter-arrow operations, and can give different views for sentences. Thereafter we formalize the rules of aspectual shifts in situated inference, in the style of a logic programming language. Thus, we not only describe the static representation of temporal features, but also show the dynamic process to deduce how each eventuality is viewed. The rules are applied to the information flow through the sequence of commands; therefore, we consider how the temporal structure of a command affects the succeeding commands.