We are interested in the nature of content structures in terms of which it would be possible to account for reasoning processes in understanding natural language texts. One of the most crucial problems here at the present time is: how and by which mechanisms these reasoning processes are controlled and directed. As the emphasis in the design of discourse understanding systems so far has been on the problems of knowledge organization and representation, we are only beginning to guess what the corresponding processing mechanisms are and how they function, although an increasing number of papers has been devoted to.
