A survey of imperatives and action representation formalisms

Representation and reasoning of actions is a wide spread area in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. The representation involves natural language instructions, which are based on the linguistic concepts and the reasoning methodology deals with the logical structures. In the computational domain, several theories pertaining to the state-space approach have been proposed to represent and reason out actions. Considering these aspects, this paper provides an account of work from the viewpoint of linguistics, logic and action representation formalisms. Based on this study, this paper then proposes a seven axes categorization scheme, that can be used to compare and analyze different theories.