Semantic Analyses and Representations
Frédéric Landragin · 2013
This chapter offers an idea of the linguistic phenomena that appear in man-machine dialogue (MMD) and of the understanding processes to consider in order to deal with them. The first section of the chapter describes a few phenomena coming into play in oral and multimodal dialogue. The remaining two sections give an idea of the computational processes involved in determining meaning, with a set of processes that analyze the utterance's characteristics and a set of processes that enrich them with supplementary elements to reach a representation which can be used for dialogue management. The chapter emphasizes an aspect called the information structure. The information structure makes sense beyond the boundaries of the utterance, and thus a topical progression characterization can be added to semantic analyses, which describes how topics follow one another in a dialogue and what relations are built between one another. Controlled Vocabulary Terms linguistics; man-machine systems