Report Number: CS-TR-73-344
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: The fourteen primitive actions and their inferences.
Author: Schank, Roger C.
Date: March 1973
Abstract: In order to represent the conceptual information underlying a natural language sentence, a conceptual structure has been established that uses the basic actor-action-object framework. It was the intent that these structures have only one representation for one meaning, regardless of the semantic form of the sentence being represented. Actions were reduced to their basic parts so as to effect this. It was found that only fourteen basic actions were needed as building blocks by which all verbs can be represented. Each of these actions has a set of actions or states which can be inferred when they are present.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/344/CS-TR-73-344.pdf