An artificial intelligence approach to the study of the humanist literary movement in XIVth and XVth century France

Abstract

The RESEDA project was formed to provide specialists of the XIVth and XVth centuries with an interactive method of processing biographical data. At present, thanks to the joint financing of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the D616gation G6n6rale /t la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (contract 75.7.0456), a test model is being worked out with the leading characters of the humanist literary movement in France. The methodological interest of the project seems to lie essentially in the attempt to enrich the techniques of information retrieval by instruments endowed with a certain deductive power (Cros et al. 1968; Fossier, Cr6hange 1970) in order to assess, by working with a concrete example, the tools necessary for simulation of quite complex intellectual processes. Moreover, owing to the extremely complex and very often implicit nature of the relations between the characters who interest us, it is almost essential to have recourse to very sophisticated methods. The target is, in fact, the creation of a system which would have not only a static function of recuperating a stored item of information but also a dynamic function of establishing new links between the data and increasing, as it were, the initial knowledge. Therefore RESEDA must to a certain extent enter the sphere of artificial intelligence.