Early interpretation by implicature in definite referential descriptions
Raquel Fernández · UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) · 2010
This paper discusses the processes by which dialogue participants incrementally compute the conveyed meaning of referential descriptions. I show that some of the phenomena observed in the psycholinguistics literature can be accounted for by theories of conversational implicature that exploit ingredients from computational models of Referring Expression Generation. The result is a system that computes inferences incrementally, from partial utterances, without need to reason with hypothesized complete descriptions.