Dialogue pragmatics and context specification
Harry Bunt · Natural language processing · 2000
Introduction Pragmatics is commo,nly understood to be concerned with studying the relations between linguistic phenomena and properties of the context of use. The understanding of these relations is important in many areas of theoretical and applied research, from grammatical analysis to sociolinguistic field studies. One area where the importance of these relations has become particularly clear is the design of language understanding systems. Such systems are extremely limited, brittle, and unpractical if they do not have powerful ways to make use of contextual information in computing the meanings of utterances. The question of how this can be achieved in an effective and principled way forms one of the major obstacles in building such systems. Computational pragmatics, the study of how contextual information can be effectively brought to bear in language understanding and production processes, hopes to contribute to removing this obstacle. One way in which contextual infor