 At this point we should pause to consider some interpretive methods that do not conform with the above very common but not universally employed syntax-driven approach. First, Schank and his collaborators emphasized the role of lexical knowledge, especially primitive actions used in verb decomposition, and knowledge about stereotyped patterns of behavior  in the interpretive process, nearly to the exclusion of syntax. For example, a sentence beginning  “John went …” would lead to the generation of a ptrans conceptualization (since go is lexically interpreted in terms of ptrans), where John fills the agent role and where a phrase interpretable as a location is expected, as part of the configuration of roles that attach to a ptrans act. If the sentence then continues as “… to the restaurant”, the expectation is confirmed, and at this point instantiation of a restaurant script is triggered, creating expectations about the likely sequence of actions by John and other agents in the restaurant (e.g., Schank and Abelson 1977). These ideas had considerable appeal, and led to unprecedented successes in machine understanding of some paragraph-length stories. Another approach to interpretation that subordinates syntax to semantics is one that employs domain-specific semantic grammars (Brown and Burton 1975). While these resemble context-free syntactic grammars (perhaps procedurally implemented in ATN-like manner), their constituents are chosen to be meaningful in the chosen application domain. For example, an electronics tutoring system might employ categories such as measurement, hypothesis, or transistor instead of NP, and fault-specification or voltage-specification instead of VP.  The importance of these approaches lay in their recognition of the fact that knowledge powerfully shapes our  ultimate interpretation of text and dialogue, enabling understanding even in the presence of noisy, flawed, and partial linguistic input. Nonetheless, most of the  NL understanding community since the 1970s has treated syntactic parsing as an important aspect of the understanding process, in part because modularization of this complex process is thought to be crucial for scalability, and in part because of the very plausible Chomskian contention that human syntactic intuitions operate reliably even in the absence of clear meaning, as in his famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.