Formal Semantics of Dialogues Based on Belief Sharing and Observational Equivalence of Dialogues
Norihiro Ogata · Journal of Natural Language Processing · 1999
This paper shows that there is a direct connection between dialogues and belief sharing.This connection is shown by proving a correspondence between observational equivalence between dialogues and epistemic bisimulation between Hyper-Discourse Representation Structures(Hyper-DRS)constructed from dialogues.An observational equivalence between dialogues is defined by a kind of similarity of resulting shared beliefs of the dialogues.The theory of Hyper-DRSs is defined by extending Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory(Kamp and Reyle 1993),a formal semantics of discourse or a dynamic semantics,which is exploiting the theory of hypersets (Aczel 1987;Barwise and Moss 1996)in order to solve the problem of the definition, formation and revision of circular objects like shared beliefs.