Contents 1 Introduction: grammatical reasoning 1 2 Linguistic inference: the Lambek systems 5 2.1 Modelinggrammaticalcomposition ............................ 5 2.2 Gentzen calculus, cut elimination and decidability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.3 Discussion: options for resource management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3 The syntax-semantics interface: proofs and readings 16 3.1 Term assignment for categorial deductions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3.2 Natural language interpretation: the deductive view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4 Grammatical composition: multimodal systems 26 4.1 Mixedinference:themodesofcomposition........................ 26 4.2 Grammaticalcomposition:unaryoperations ....................... 30 4.2.1 Unary connectives: logic and structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 4.2.2 Applications: imposing constraints, structural relaxation

Dialogues are usually motivated by some underlying, noncommunicative goal. Participants in a dialogue therefore perform two tasks at once: that of trying to achieve the underlying noncommunicative goal, and that of communicating in order to achieve the associated communicative goal. This is reflected in the fact that dialogues consist not only of elements motivated by the underlying task, but also of elements motivated by the communicative task and dealing with aspects that require constant attention in communication, such as ensuring contact, providing feedback, monitoring the attention, taking turns, repairing communicative failures, etc. We use the term dialogue control to refer to these aspects of dialogue. In this paper we present an analysis of the various aspects of dialogue control, focusing on the identification and definition of the communicative functions of dialogue control acts in information-seeking dialogues. 1 Introduction Occasionally, the participants in ...

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The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

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. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

We present a system for the incremental interpretation of natural-language utterances in context. The main goal of the work is to account for the influences of context on interpretation, while preserving compositionality to the extent possible. To achieve this goal, we introduce a representational device, conditional interpretations, and a rule system for constructing them. Conditional interpretations represent the potential contributions of phrases to the interpretation of an utterance. The rules specify how phrase interpretations are combined and how they are elaborated with respect to context. The control structure defined by the rules determines the points in the interpretation process at which sufficient information becomes available to carry out specific inferential interpretation steps, such as determining the plausibility of particular referential connections or modifier attachments. We have implemented these ideas in Candide, a system for interactive acquisition of procedural ...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restriction discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of context-dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context-dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically.

We investigate how belief change in cooperative dialogues can be handled within a modal logic of action, belief, and intention. We first review the main approaches of the literature, and point out some of their shortcomings. We then propose a new framework for belief change. Our basic notion is that of a contextual topic: we suppose that we can associate a set of topics with every agent, speech act, and formula. This allows us to talk about an agent's competence, belief adoption, and belief preservation. Based on these principles we analyse the agents ' belief states after a speech act. We illustrate our theory by a running example. 1

The modern computational lexical semantics reached a point in its development when it has become necessary to define the premises and goals of each of its several trends. This paper proposes ten choices in terms of which these premises and goals can be discussed. It is argued that the central questions include the use of lexical rules for generating word senses; the role of syntax, pragmatics, and formal semantics in the specification of lexical meaning; the use of a world model, or ontology, as the organizing principle for lexical-semantic descriptions; the use of rules with limited scope; the relation between static and dynamic resources; the commitment to descriptive coverage; the trade-off between generalization and idiosyncracy; and, finally, the adherence to the "supply-side" (method-oriented) or "demand-side" (task-oriented) ideology of research. The discussion is inspired by, but not limited to, the comparison between the generative lexicon approach and the ontologi...