C3: The Compositional Construction of Context. 'A More Effective and Efficient Way to Marshal Inferences from Background Knowledge'
David D. McDonald, James D. Pustejovsky · 2013
Abstract : In July, James gave a full day tutorial entitled Actions, Objects, and their Habitats at the Summer School in Cognitive Linguistics in Bangor, Wales, with this abstract. In this talk, I outline the challenges facing linguistic theories and computational language modeling in the attempt to contextualize linguistic knowledge in a non-linguistic world. I will focus on two aspects of contextualization of meaning: sentential semantic enrichment, involving extra-compositional mechanisms, such as coercion, co-composition, and other semantic devices used in Generative Lexicon Theory. The second aspect involves the embedding of linguistic utterances within the contexts of their use by speakers, mediated through deeper representational structures. I introduce the notion of 'conceptual habitat', for the frame, script, and affordance based information associated with linguistic expressions. These habitats compose to create 'minimal simulations', which are temporally traced minimal models, constructed from the use of linguistic expressions in specific contextualized frames, interpreted from a particular point of view. Minimal simulation is shown to be a computationally tractable approach to the dynamic interpretation of contexts, by virtue of the perspective-based constraints imposed.