Text comprehension and the computational mind-agencies

Guided by a polymath approach-encompassing neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and computer science, this article describes a novel 'cognitive' computational mind framework for text comprehension in terms of Minsky's 'Society of Mind' and 'Emotion Machine' theories. Observing a top-down design method, we enumerate here the macrocosmic elements of the model-the 'agencies' and memory constructs, followed by an elucidation on the working principles and synthesis concerns. Besides corroboration of results of a dry-run test by thoughts generated by random human subjects; the completeness of the conceptualized framework has been validated as a consequence of its total representation of 'text understanding' functions of the human brain, types of human memory and emulation of the layers of the mind. A brief conceptual comparison, between the architecture and existing 'conscious' agents, has been included as well. The framework, though observed here in its capacity as a text comprehender, is capable of understanding in general. A cognitive model of text comprehension, besides contributing to the 'thinking machines' research enterprise, is envisioned to be strategic in the design of intelligent plagiarism checkers, literature genre-cataloguers, differential diagnosis systems, and educational aids for children with reading disorders. Turing's landmark 1950 article on computational intelligence is the principal motivator behind our research initiative.