Introduction Pragmatics is commo,nly understood to be concerned with studying the relations between linguistic phenomena and properties of the context of use. The understanding of these relations is important in many areas of theoretical and applied research, from grammatical analysis to sociolinguistic field studies. One area where the importance of these relations has become particularly clear is the design of language understanding systems. Such systems are extremely limited, brittle, and unpractical if they do not have powerful ways to make use of contextual information in computing the meanings of utterances. The question of how this can be achieved in an effective and principled way forms one of the major obstacles in building such systems. Computational pragmatics, the study of how contextual information can be effectively brought to bear in language understanding and production processes, hopes to contribute to removing this obstacle. One way in which contextual infor

Standard grammar formalisms are defined without reflection of the incremental, serial and context-dependent nature of language processing; any incrementality must therefore be reflected by independently defined parsing and/or generation techniques, and context-dependence by separate pragmatic modules. This leads to a poor setup for modelling dialogue, with its rich speaker-hearer interaction and high proportion of context-dependent and apparently grammatically ill-formed utterances. Instead, this paper takes an inherently incremental grammar formalism (Dynamic Syntax: Kempson et al., 2001), proposes a context-based extension and defines corresponding contextdependent parsing and generation models together with a resulting natural definition of context-dependent well-formedness. These are shown to allow a straightforward model of otherwise problematic dialogue phenomena such as shared utterances, ellipsis and alignment. We conclude that language competence is a capacity for dialogue. 1

This chapter investigates the computational consequences of a broadly Gricean view of language use as intentional activity. In this view, dialogue rests on coordinated reasoning about communicative intentions. The speaker produces each utterance by formulating a suitable communicative intention. The hearer understands it by recognizing the communicative intention behind it. When this coordination is successful, interlocutors succeed in considering the same intentions— that is, the same representations of utterance meaning—as the dialogue proceeds. In this paper, I emphasize that these intentions can be formalized; we can provide abstract but systematic representations that spell out what a speaker is trying to do with an utterance. Such representations describe utterances simultaneously as the product of our knowledge of grammar and as actions chosen for a reason. In particular, they must characterize the speaker’s utterance in grammatical terms, provide the links to the context that the grammar requires, and so arrive at a contribution that the speaker aims to achieve. Because I have implemented this formalism, we can regard it as a possible analysis of conversational processes at the level of computational theory. Nevertheless, this analysis leaves open what the nature of the biological computation involved in inference to intentions is, and what regularities in language use support this computation.

We present an approach to the resolution of multimodal referential expressions in a cooperative human-machine communication setting, provided by the DenK system. We discuss how references involving multiple modalities are resolved, and we also indicate how the system can respond cooperatively in case the resolution process fails. 1

this article, we want to get a formal grip on the way in which context influences the behaviour of presuppositions. Before we describe how we intend to do this, let us first describe the notion of context we are interested in. There are various uses of the term `context'. Bunt (1995) characterizes context as all those factors which are relevant to the understanding of communicative behaviour, and he goes on to distinguish five major dimensions: the linguistic context, the semantic context, the physical context, the social context and the cognitive context. For presuppositions in general, and for bridging in particular, the following seem most relevant: the linguistic context, as this will contain the antecedents from which a bridge has to be constructed, and the cognitive context, which according to Bunt includes the attentional state and the world knowledge of an interlocutor. Throughout this article we will therefore focus on the linguistic and the cognitive context. The resulting, global picture is as follows: an interpreter tries to understand a sentence in some context \Gamma. This context contains representations of the preceding discourse (the linguistic context) as well as background knowledge (the cognitive context). The interlocutor assumes that parts of her context are, to some extent, public. That is, they form what the interlocutor assumes to be the common ground. In this article, we are particularly interested in how interlocutors use the context to come to an understanding of the current sentence, and how they can adjust their context on the fly, so to speak, when the current sentence calls for such an adjustment. This brings out the extreme flexibility of context in natural language communication: speaker and hearer constantly attempt to align their repr...

Following the pattern of grammars for formal languages, two methodological assumptions have driven the development of natural-language grammars over the past half-century. The first is that a natural-language grammar is a set of principles that determines the set of wellformed sentence-strings by associating with all such strings a structure and an interpretation compositionally derived from the interpretations of the elementary expressions and their mode of combination in that structure. Linguists may disagree over the concept of interpretation to be assigned to strings; but none doubt that syntactic principles induce structure over the strings on the basis of which interpretations for those strings are definable. The second is that these syntactic principles, whatever form they take, are independent of any properties that might be attributable to the dynamics of how language is used in processing in real time, and have to be seen as feeding theories of performance/pragmatics to determine how language is used/processed in context. Accordingly a string is said to be wellformed iff it is licensed

Introduction: general and computational pragmatics Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies the relations between linguistic phenomena and aspects of the context of language use. To understand these relations is of crucial importance in many areas of theoretical, computational, and applied linguistics. In theoretical linguistics, the analysis of such phenomena as anaphora, deixis, and tense requires taking properties into account of the context in which expressions exhibiting these phenomena can be used. Utterances which are context-dependent in such ways are called indexical. Bar-Hillel (1954) has argued that indexicality is pervasive in natural language, and speculated that more than 90% of all declarative utterances are indexical. Indexical expressions encode information about aspects of context: about objects introduced earlier in the discourse, about objects that form part of the physical and perceptual context, or about the (relative) time

‘Now on the water surface pensively she rests, desire she has no more’ Translation from: De Waterlelie Frederik van Eeden In this paper a dialogue game is presented that enables us to generate coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. Central to this approach is the fact that the cognitive states of players change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and that these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. The rules of the game are roughly based on the Gricean maxims of co-operation – i.e. agents are forbidden to put forward information they do not believe and are forbidden to ask anything they already believe; the Gricean maxim of relevance is determined by a so-called imbalance in the players ’ belief and desire state. As in realistic conversational situations, it is assumed that the information needed to answer a question can be present in a distributed manner. Consequently, the structure of the dialogues may become rather complex, and may result in the generation of counter-questions and sub-dialogues. It will be shown that the structure and the coherence of conversational units do not necessarily have to be the product of a complex planning process or a speech act grammar, but can be based on elementary generation rules that take only into account the local context. As a result, the conversational game does not suffer from the same computational complexity as existing planning models for speech act generation. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with dialogue properties found in Conversation Analysis.

In this paper, we make a case for the intrinsic richness of the Question Generation task and then very briefly motivate an application of Question Generation in the context of generating dialogue from monologue. Characterizing Question Generation In this section, we propose an inclusive characterization of Question Generation (henceforth QG), embracing a wide variety of approaches. In our view, such an open-minded approach is most conducive for a new and hopefully soon burgeoning research field. We strongly support concrete tasks and resources to develop the field, but without losing sight of the wider context of Question Generation as a general problem.

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