A formal semantics for situated conversation

By Julie Hunter, Alex Lascarides. 2018

While linguists and philosophers have sought to model the various ways in which the meaning of what we say can depend on the nonlinguistic context, this work has by and large focused on how the nonlinguistic context can be exploited to ground or anchor referential or otherwise context-sensitive expressions. In this paper, we focus on examples in which nonlinguistic events contribute entire discourse units that serve as arguments to coherence relations, without the mediation of context-sensitive expressions. We use both naturally occurring and constructed examples to highlight these interactions and to argue that extant coherence-based accounts of discourse should be extended to model them. We also argue that extending coherence-based accounts in this way is a nontrivial task. It forces us to reassess basic notions of the nonlinguistic context and rhetorical relations as well as models of discourse structure, evolution, and interpretation. Our paper addresses the conceptual and technical revisions that these types of interaction demand.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing

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AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark (2021, background): “…requires both linguistic processing and reasoning over the combination of the linguistic signal, communicative common ground, and world knowledge [Hunter et al., 2018], but while linguistic knowledge is relatively self-contained and reusable across different textual domains, world knowledge is…”