  We describe an application of Answer Set Programming to the understanding of
narratives about stereotypical activities, demonstrated via question answering.
Substantial work in this direction was done by Erik Mueller, who modeled
stereotypical activities as scripts. His systems were able to understand a good
number of narratives, but could not process texts describing exceptional
scenarios. We propose addressing this problem by using a theory of intentions
developed by Blount, Gelfond, and Balduccini. We present a methodology in which
we substitute scripts by activities (i.e., hierarchical plans associated with
goals) and employ the concept of an intentional agent to reason about both
normal and exceptional scenarios. We exemplify the application of this
methodology by answering questions about a number of restaurant stories. This
paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
