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.

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Contents 1. Introduction : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 3 2. The Problem of Anaphoric Linking in Context : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 4 3. Basic Ideas of Discourse Representation : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 5 4. Discourse Representation Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 14 5. The Static and Dynamic Meaning of Representation Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 17 6. Sequential Composition of Representation Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 21 7. Strategies for Merging Representation Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 27 8. Disjoint Mer

. 1 Another important source for the interest in underspecification is lexical semantics. Example (2) is a representative for a large field of ambiguity phenomena, which are conventionally classified as lexical ambiguities, but differ from trivial cases like the homonyms bank or pen in several important ways. 1 Earlier, but less influential research on underspecification was performed in the phliqa project at Philips Research Labs, where it seems that the concept of `meta-variables' was actually discovered; see e.g. Bronnenberg et al. (1979); Landsbergen & Scha (1979); Bunt (1984; 1985). boek-pinkal.tex; 27/08/1999; 13:09; p.1 33 H. Bunt and R. Muskens (eds.) Computing Meaning. Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht 1999, 33--55.. 34 MANFRED PINKAL (2) John began the book Rather than locating the source of ambiguity of sentence (2) in the verb b

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Architecture The Alma Abstract Architecture (AAA) is the virtual architecture used during the intermediate code generation phase of the Alma-0 compiler. The AAA combines the features of the abstract machines for imperative languages and for logic programming languages. The compiler compiles the Alma-0 programs into AAA programs. In a second phase the AAA instructions are translated into C statements. As the Alma-0 language itself, the AAA aims to combine the best of both worlds; elements were taken from virtual machines used to compile imperative languages (in particular the RISC architecture described in Wirth [1996, pp. 55--59], and from the WAM machine used to compile a logical language (see Ait-Kaci [1991]). Still, the AAA resembles most the virtual machines used in the compilation of imperative languages. The additions made to provide for the extensions of the Alma-0 language are ---the failure handling instructions ONFAIL, FAIL, 40 \Delta Krzysztof R. Apt et al ---the log ...

We describe a logic which is the same as first-order logic except that it allows control over the information that passes down from formulas to subformulas. For example the logic is adequate to express branching quantifiers. We describe a compositional semantics for this logic; in particular this gives a compositional meaning to formulas of the `information-friendly' language of Hintikka and Sandu. For first-order formulas the semantics reduces to Tarski's semantics for first-order logic. We prove that two formulas have the same interpretation in all structures if and only if replacing an occurrence of one by an occurrence of the other in a sentence never alters the truth-value of the sentence in any structure.

This paper was partly written during a stay at LIMSI-CNRS laboratory in Orsay, in Spring 1995 be of a communicative nature. Dialogue goals may be complex, giving rise to subgoals and to a certain amount of dialogue planning. Communicative subgoals may also arise locally in the dialogue because of unanticipated responses and because of the complexity of the perceptual, understanding, evaluation, and other cognitive processes involved in interpreting and generating communicative behaviour.

Natural language generation (NLG) is first and foremost a reasoning task. In this reasoning, a system plans a communicative act that will signal key facts about the domain to the hearer. In generating action descriptions, this reasoning draws on characterizations both of the causal properties of the domain and the states of knowledge of the participants in the conversation. This dissertation shows how such characterizations can be specified declaratively and accessed efficiently in NLG. The heart of this dissertation is a study of logical statements about knowledge and action in modal logic. By investigating the proof-theory of modal logic from a logic programming point of view, I show how many kinds of modal statements can be seen as straightforward instructions for computationally manageable search, just as Prolog clauses can. These modal statements provide sufficient expressive resources for an NLG system to represent the effects of actions in the world or to model an addressee whose knowledge in some respects exceeds and in other respects falls short of its own. To illustrate the use of such statements, I describe how the SPUD sentence planner exploits a modal knowledge base to

This paper investigates a new representation format for dynamic discourse in DRT, where contextual dynamics is modeled in terms of update conditions. This new representation format is motivated by the study of context dependence in modal constructions, in particular by serious problems besetting earlier approaches to modality and modal subordination in DRT. We present an alternative DRT analysis that provides a unified analysis of relative modality