Results 1 - 10
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522
Interpretation as Abduction
, 1990
"... An approach to abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described ..."
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Cited by 687 (38 self)
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An approach to abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described and illustrated. It also suggests an elegant and thorough integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 1
Contributing to Discourse
- Cognitive Science
, 1989
"... For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they odd to their common ground in on orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees hove underst ..."
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Cited by 598 (10 self)
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For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they odd to their common ground in on orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees hove understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for o variety of features of everyday conversations.
Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics
, 1998
"... For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists, ..."
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Cited by 220 (5 self)
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For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists,
A Compositional Semantics for Multiple Focus Constructions
- In: Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) I. Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 10
, 1991
"... The subject of this article is the semantics of focus, i.e. the development of a framework in which we can formulate the influence of focus on the semantic and pragmatic interpretation. In section (1), I will discuss such a framework, structured meanings. In section (2), I will point out some of its ..."
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Cited by 180 (8 self)
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The subject of this article is the semantics of focus, i.e. the development of a framework in which we can formulate the influence of focus on the semantic and pragmatic interpretation. In section (1), I will discuss such a framework, structured meanings. In section (2), I will point out some of its shortcomings, as it is currently worked outi they have to do with cases
Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination
- Cognition
, 1987
"... This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game. Two ..."
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Cited by 177 (9 self)
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This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game. Two types of analysis are reported. The first is a semantic analysis of the various types of description, which indicates how pairs of speakers develop different language schemes associated with different mental models of the maze configuration. The second analysis concerns how the communicants co-ordi-nate in developing their description schemes. The results from this study would suggest that language processing in dia-logue may be governed by local principles of interaction which have received little attention in the psychological and linguistic literature to date.
Information state and dialogue management in the TRINDI dialogue move engine toolkit
- Natural Language Engineering
, 2000
"... We introduce an architecture and toolkit for building dialogue managers currently being developed in the TRINDI project, based on the notions of information state and dialogue move engine. The aim is to provide a framework for experimenting with implementations of di erent theories of information st ..."
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Cited by 173 (12 self)
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We introduce an architecture and toolkit for building dialogue managers currently being developed in the TRINDI project, based on the notions of information state and dialogue move engine. The aim is to provide a framework for experimenting with implementations of di erent theories of information state, information state update and dialogue control. Anumber of dialogue managers are currently being built using the toolkit, and we present a detailed look at one of them. We believe that this framework will make implementation of dialogue processing theories easier, also facilitating comparison of di erent types of dialogue systems, thus helping to achieve a prerequisite for arriving at a best practice for the development of the dialogue management component ofaspoken dialogue system. 1
Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface
, 1998
"... The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly p ..."
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Cited by 169 (8 self)
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The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly pairs phonological and logical forms without intermediary representational levels.
Understanding by addressees and overhearers
- Cognitive Psychology
, 1989
"... In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advant ..."
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Cited by 157 (11 self)
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In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advantage, we pro-pose, because they can actively collaborate with speakers in reaching the mutual belief that they have understood what was said, whereas overhearers cannot. As evidence for the proposal, we looked at triples of people in which one person told another person in conversation how to arrange 12 complex figures while an over-hearer tried to arrange them too. All three began as strangers with the same background information. As predicted, addressees were more accurate at arrang-ing the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word. Other evidence suggests that the very process of understanding is different for addressees and overhearers. 8 1989 Acadermc Press, Inc. People understand each other in conversations by gathering evidence about each other’s intentions. How do they do that? The traditional view, which we will call the autonom&s view, is that they listen to the words uttered, decode them, and interpret them against what they take to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation (e.g., Anderson,
Representation and Inference for Natural language - A First Course in . . .
, 1999
"... 3.672> X with the complex term 1 + 1, not with 2, which, for people unused to Prolog's little ways, tends to come as a bit of a surprise. If we want to carry out the actual arithmetic involved, we have to explicitly force evaluation by making use of the very special inbuilt `operator' ..."
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Cited by 103 (11 self)
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3.672> X with the complex term 1 + 1, not with 2, which, for people unused to Prolog's little ways, tends to come as a bit of a surprise. If we want to carry out the actual arithmetic involved, we have to explicitly force evaluation by making use of the very special inbuilt `operator' is/2. This calls an inbuilt mechanism which carries out the arithmetic evaluation of its second argument, and then unication plays no role here!). On the other hand, \== checks whether its argument are not identical. Arithmetic Prolog contains some built-in operators for handling integer arithmetic. These include *, / +, - (for multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction, respectively) and >, < for comparing numbers. These symbols, however, are just ordinary Prolog operators. That is, they are just a user friendly notation for writing
Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates
- Language
, 2005
"... In this paper we develop a semantic typology of gradable predicates, with special emphasis on deverbal adjectives. We argue for the linguistic relevance of this typol-ogy by demonstrating that the distribution and interpretation of degree modiers is sensitive to its two major classicatory parameters ..."
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Cited by 101 (4 self)
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In this paper we develop a semantic typology of gradable predicates, with special emphasis on deverbal adjectives. We argue for the linguistic relevance of this typol-ogy by demonstrating that the distribution and interpretation of degree modiers is sensitive to its two major classicatory parameters: (1) whether a gradable predicate is associated with what we call an OPEN or CLOSED scale and (2) whether the stan-dard of comparison for the applicability of the predicate is ABSOLUTE or RELATIVE to a context. We further show that the classication of an important subclass of ad-jectives within the typology is largely predictable. Specically, the scale structure of a deverbal gradable adjective correlates either with the algebraic part structure of the event denoted by its source verb or with the part structure of the entities to which the adjective applies. These correlations underscore the fact that gradability is character-istic not only of adjectives but also of verbs and nouns, and that scalar properties are shared by categorially distinct but derivationally-related expressions. 1. DEGREE MODIFICATION IN DEVERBAL GRADABLE ADJECTIVES Among the many observations made in Bolinger’s (1972) classic study of degree expres-
