Poesio, M. (1994), Discourse interpretation and the scope of operators. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, Dept. of Computer Science. Rochester, NY.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

.... focused on apparent ambiguities, which can be resolved by linguistic aspects of the context of occurrence (e.g. MacDonald 1994) The wide spread use of underspeci ed semantic representations has triggered questions such as, for example, Under what circumstances is disambiguation necessary (Poesio 1994, 1996) What kinds of inferences do people draw from an utterance before it is fully disambiguated (For example, if you shout Watch out He s trying to shoot you, the addressee might decide to seek hiding even if he is unable to resolve the referent of the pronoun he. It is intuitively clear ....

....formal tools to study logical consequence as a relation between sentences some of which may be ambiguous. But recently, some tentative e orts in this direction were made, including Reyle (1993, 1995, 1996) Van Deemter (1991,1996b) Van Eijck and Jaspars (1995) Fernando (1995) Alshawi (1996) Poesio (1994, 1996) So far, there is little unanimity about what is or are acceptable notions of logical consequence in an ambiguous setting (ambiguous consequence, for short) In what follows, we will introduce some basic terminology and, drawing on insights from the literature, we will chart the main ....

Poesio, M. (1994), Discourse interpretation and the scope of operators. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, Dept. of Computer Science. Rochester, NY.

....on the factors contributing to its disambiguation (e.g. Gorfein 1989, MacDonald 1994) The wide spread use of underspecified semantic representations has triggered new questions having to do with issues other than disambiguation. For example, under what circumstances is disambiguation necessary (Poesio 1994, 1996) What kinds of inferences do people draw from an utterance before it is propertly disambiguated (For example, if you shout Watch out He s trying to shoot you , the addressee might decide to lie down and seek hiding even if he is unable to resolve the referent of the pronoun he . It is ....

....formal tools to study logical consequence as a relation between sentences some of which may be ambiguous. But recently, some tentative efforts in this direction were made, including Reyle (1993, 1995, 1996) Van Deemter (1991,1996b) Van Eijck and Jaspars (1995) Fernando (1995) Alshawi (1996) Poesio (1994, 1996) In what follows, we will borrow freely from the work reported in these papers. The logic of underspecified representations can be and has been studied using different underlying representational formalisms (predicate logic, DRSs, etc. In addition, ambiguity may be modeled in ....

Poesio, M. (1994), Discourse interpretation and the scope of operators. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, Dept. of Computer Science. Rochester, NY.

.... focused on apparent ambiguities, which can be resolved by linguistic aspects of the context of occurrence (e.g. MacDonald 1994) The wide spread use of underspecified semantic representations has triggered questions such as, for example, Under what circumstances is disambiguation necessary (Poesio 1994, 1996) What kinds of inferences do people draw from an utterance before it is fully disambiguated (For example, if you shout Watch out He s trying to shoot you, the addressee might decide to seek hiding even if he is unable to resolve the referent of the pronoun he. It is intuitively clear ....

....formal tools to study logical consequence as a relation between sentences some of which may be ambiguous. But recently, some tentative efforts in this direction were made, including Reyle (1993, 1995, 1996) Van Deemter (1991,1996b) Van Eijck and Jaspars (1995) Fernando (1995) Alshawi (1996) Poesio (1994, 1996) So far, there is little unanimity about what is or are acceptable notions of logical consequence in an ambiguous setting (ambiguous consequence, for short) In what follows, we will introduce some basic terminology and, drawing on insights from the literature, we will chart the main ....

Poesio, M. (1994), Discourse interpretation and the scope of operators. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, Dept. of Computer Science. Rochester, NY.

....SAD 93 arrives at an hypothesis by applying discourse interpretationrules with varying strength, all of which operate directly off the underspecified interpretation. The decision to integrate scope interpretation with other aspects of pragmatic interpretation reflects the thesis put forth in [Poesio, 1994] that the scoping preferences of human subjects result from the interaction of several discourse interpretation processes. 2.3 Speech Act Analysis The speech act interpreter is responsible for determining what the speaker means by her utterance. For instance, when a speaker utters there are ....

Poesio, Massimo 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester. forthcoming.

....until higher level information can be used to disambiguate. 1 Introduction In this paper we describe a method for analysing the temporal structure of a discourse. This component was implemented as part of a discourse grammar for English. The goals of We would like to thank Alex Lascarides and Massimo Poesio for comments on an earlier draft. y This work was supported in part by the European Commission s programme on Linguistic Research and Engineering through project LRE 61062, Towards a declarative theory of discourse. the temporal component were to yield a detailed representation of the ....

Massimo Poesio. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

....recent example of work also attempting to exploit the properties of underspecified representations to address linguistic questions is Crouch 1995. Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity 3 face discourse interpretation system SAD 93, used in the TRAINS 93 demo system. SAD 93 is described in Poesio 1994. 2 Ambiguity in Natural Language 2.1 Ambiguity and Grammar 2.1.1 Characterizing Ambiguity The dictionary definitions of the terms ambiguity and ambiguous try to capture the intuition that an expression is ambiguous if it has multiple meanings . An example are the following entries, from ....

.... the theories about the effects of local focusing on the choice of pronoun antecedents such as Grosz et al. 1983; the work on temporal interpretation by Asher, Lascarides, and Oberlander (see, e.g. Lascarides et al. 1992) and work on scopal disambiguation such as Kurtzman and MacDonald 1993, Poesio 1994. 2.4 Semantic Ambiguity versus Perceived Ambiguity A preliminary and, I hope, uncontroversial conclusion I intend to draw from the discussion on deliberate ambiguity and ambiguity processing is that a theory of ambiguity that aims at explaining the Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle needs to be ....

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Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

.... discussed in Allen s textbook [1987] more recently, the constraint based semantics of Nerbonne [Nerbonne, 1991] Quasi Logical Form [Alshawi and van Eijck, Alshawi and Crouch, 1992; Alshawi, 1992] Reyle s Underspecified DRT [Reyle, 1993b] and Poesio s Conversation Representation Theory [Poesio, 1994] . 3 Part of the solution to the combinatorial explosion problem may be that some forms of ambiguity at least are solved locally and incrementally, and therefore the dreaded explosion of readings never occurs, since at any moment, only a score or so of readings need to be 3.2 Background 3.2.1 ....

....a QLF formula which does not contain another QLF formula as one of its constituents cannot express that of three quantifiers Q1 ; Q2 and Q3 , Q1 and Q2 have scope over Q3 while the scope relation between Q1 and Q2 is left unspecified. 3.3. 4 Conversation Representation Theory Poesio proposes in [ Poesio, 1994 ] an account of disambiguation and discourse interpretation based on a distinction between semantic ambiguity and perceived ambiguity. The theory of ambiguity proposed by Poesio consists of two main parts: 1. an underspecified language which can be used to code semantic ambiguity implicitly, thus ....

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Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science.

....and reasoning encountered in task oriented natural language conversations are studied (Allen et al. 1995) The theory of ambiguity proposed in this paper is the basis for the implemented surface discourse interpretation system SAD 93, used in the TRAINS 93 demo system. SAD 93 is described in (Poesio , 1994). 2 Ambiguity in Natural Language 2.1 Ambiguity and Grammar 2.1.1 Characterizing Ambiguity The dictionary definitions of the terms ambiguity and ambiguous try to capture the intuition that an expression is ambiguous if it has multiple meanings . An example are the following entries, from ....

.... about the effects of local focusing on the choice of pronoun antecedents such as (Grosz et al. 1983) the work on temporal interpretation by Asher, Lascarides, and Oberlander (see, e.g. Lascarides et al. 1992) and work on scopal disambiguation such as (Kurtzman and MacDonald , 1993; Poesio , 1994). 2.4 Semantic Ambiguity versus Perceived Ambiguity A preliminary and, I hope, uncontroversial conclusion I intend to draw from the discussion on deliberate ambiguity and ambiguity processing is that a theory of ambiguity that aims at explaining the Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle needs to be ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

....management in a system dealing with conversations. This new theory is meant to be one that an agent can use as an internal on line representation of context while engaging in conversation. This work is based on merging some of the ideas from two recent works within these traditions, namely [ Poesio, 1994 ] and [ Traum, 1994 ] As the ideas from both of these models of context were implemented as modules within the same conversation system (using conversion languages for communication) we have reasons for optimism, both for the soundness of the contextual model, and for the utility of the result. ....

....alternative ways of achieving the goal, each of which corresponds to a different possible situation. A version of DRT that addresses these issues and is based on the hypotheses about the common ground made in Situation Semantics, called Conversation Representation Theory (CRT) was introduced in [ Poesio, 1994 ] In CRT much of the formal machinery of DRT is preserved, including the update algorithm, but the Root DRS is taken to consist of information about the occurrence of speech acts or, as we will call them here, conversational events, and each utterance introduces two situations: a conversational ....

Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

....sad 93 arrives at a hypothesis by applying discourse interpretation rules with varying strength, all of which operate directly off the underspecified interpretation. The decision to integrate scope interpretation with other aspects of pragmatic interpretation reflects the thesis put forth in [Poesio, 1994] that the scoping preferences of human subjects result from the interaction of several discourse interpretation processes. Speech Act Analysis The speech act interpreter is responsible for determining what the speaker means by her utterance. For instance, when a speaker utters there are oranges ....

....that tense operators and quantifiers have already been correctly scoped, and that referent determination can be done independently of scoping and tense deindexing. For the trains system, we needed an integrated account of these processes. 4. 2 CRT Conversation Representation Theory (crt) [Poesio, 1994] is an account of contextual interpretation and ambiguity resolution in conversations that builds on the theory of lexical semantics developed in Episodic Logic. The formalism used in crt extends the language of el with underspecified expressions expressions that indicate which aspects of a ....

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Poesio, M. (1994). Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. PhD thesis, University of Rochester. Also available as TR 518, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester.

....The machinery introduced so far can be used in a similar way to formalize the process of reference resolution and, given that the language is properly extended as discussed above, to formalize scope disambiguation. For an example of how to do the former, see (Alshawi, 1992) of the latter, see (Poesio, 1994). This way of formalizing disambiguation has many advantages, most important of which is that it seems consistent with what is known about the way humans process ambiguity. Many recent psychological studies 3 seem to indicate that disambiguation involves generating multiple hypotheses in ....

....the relative scope of operators, and that the interpretation of a sentence is obtained by accumulating such information until a complete order is obtained. Unfortunately, nobody has a clear idea about how this information could be inferred. For an alternative view of scope disambiguation, see (Poesio, 1994). ce 1 : NP[ q] sem fi] ce 1 : NP[ q] sem x i ] STORE ce 1 : NP[ q] sem x i ] ce 1 : NP[ q] sem fi] ce 1 OE ce 2 ce 2 : NP[ q] sem x i ] ce 2 OE ce 3 ce 3 : S :sem ff] scopes over( ce 1 , ce 3 ) ce 4 : S :sem fi(x i .ff) ....

Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

....2 (1 AN1 :E) 2 ENGINE1.1 :ENGINE) 2 V2 V V2BASE ( F 1 2) 1 TO1 ( L :X :X) 2 V2 V N2 ( P 1 2) 1 MOVE1.1 :MOVE) 2 N2 DET N1SING ( Q 1 2) 1 THE1 :THE) 2 BOXCAR1.1 :BOXCAR) 2 PERIOD1 NIL) 2. 2 Conversation Representation Theory Conversation Representation Theory (CRT) [Poesio, 1994] is an account of contextual interpretation and ambiguity resolution in conversations. The language of CRT is a superset of the language of Episodic Logic; the augmentations are designed to provide better tools to describe the context of interpretation, especially to indicate which referents are ....

....resolve contextuallydependent expressions; this results in one or more hypotheses. The hypothesis obtained by processing (2) is shown in (3) As the syntax of CRT is a superset of that of Episodic Logic, this conversion is mostly straightforward; we ignore the differences in this paper (but see [Poesio, 1994] for a discussion) 3) SIT DESCR :COA1 ( DRS ( CE5950 :CE5951) EV DESCR :CE5950 ( DRS NIL ( I :HUM :SO INIT) I :CE5950 :AT ABOUT :NOW8) I :CE5950 :SUBSIT :COA1) EV DESCR :CE5951 ( DRS NIL ( I :HUM :TELL :SYS ( SIT DESCR ( PAR : S5951 :SIT) DRS ( E5946 :E5945 :X5946) EV DESCR ....

Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

....not at all clear how the preferred reading of (9a) could be obtained. 4 My proposal can be formulated in a purely model theoretical fashion, but this would require introducing a considerable amount of material unrelated to the main topic of this paper. A treatment of this type is presented in [Poesio, 1994] . 5 The hypothesis that what determines the acceptability of a sentence like (22) is not the occurrence of a variable in post verbal position, but the status of the raised NP, is supported by the contrast noted by Safir [Safir , 1982] and reported by Heim [1987] between the acceptability of ....

Poesio, M. 1994. Discourse Interpretation and the Scope of Operators. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science, Rochester, NY.

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