Abstract
Context-dependent interpretation has taken centerstage in the theatre of language interpretation. The interpretation of personal pronouns, for example, is known to depend on the linguistic as well as the nonlinguistic environment in which they appear. Moreover, it has become clear that very similar kinds of dependence on context apply to many other phenomena including, among other things, the contextually restricted interpretation of a full Noun Phrase, the determination of the ‘comparison set’ relevant for the interpretation of a semantically vague predicate, the determination of so-called ‘implicit arguments’ of words like local and contemporary. (For references to the literature, see [van Deemter and Odijk, 1997].) Inspired by this growing body of work, dependence on linguistic context has become the cornerstone of the so-called dynamic theories of meaning (e.g. [Kamp and Reyle, 1994]). These theories characterize the meaning of a sentence as its potential to change one ‘information state’ into another, and it is this dynamic perspective on which current natural-language interpreting systems are beginning to be based.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
J. Barwise and R. Cooper, Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4.
S. Buvat, Resolving Lexical Ambiguity using a Formal Theory of Context. In K.van Deemter and S.Peters (Eds.) Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification. CSLI Publications, Stanford, Ca.
N. Chomsky, Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris, Dordrecht.
N. Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. Praeger, New York.
R. Collier and J. Landsbergen, Language and Speech Generation. Philips Journal of Research 49, 1995, pp. 419–437.
R. Dale and E. Reiter, Computational Interpretations of the Gricean Maxims in the Generation of referring Expressions. Cognitive Science 18, p. 233–263
K. van Deemter and J. Odijk. Context Modeling and the Generation of Spoken Discourse. Speech Communication 21, pp. 101–121.
K. van Deemter. Domains of Discourse and the Semantics of Ambiguous Utterances: a Reply to Gauker. Mind 107, No. 426, April 1998.
K. van Deemter. A Blackboard Model of Accenting. Computer Speech and Language 12 (3), June 1998.
Reasoning about Topics: Towards a Formal Theory. In Working Notes of the Workshop on Formalizing Context, AAAI-1995 Fall Symposium Series.
A. Dirksen, Accenting and deaccenting: a declarative approach. Proc. of Coling Conference 1992, Nantes, France.
J. Dorrepaal, Discourse anaphora. In Proceedings of COLING 1990 conference, vol II, p. 95–99.
B. J. Grosz, K. S. Jones and B. L. Webber, `Readings in Natural Language Processing’, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, Los Altos, Cal.
B. J. Grosz and C. L. Sidner. Attentions, Intentions and the Structure of Discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12, 175–204.
R. V. Guha, Contexts: A Formalization and some Applications. PhD thesis, Stanford University.
M. A. K. Halliday, Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199–244.
J. ‘t Hart, R. Collier and A. Cohen, A Perceptual Study of Intonation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
J. Hirschberg, Accent and discourse context: assigning pitch accent in synthetic speech. Proc. of AAAI 1990, p. 953.
H. Kamp and U. Reyle, From Discourse to Logic. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
D. R. Ladd, The structure of intonational meaning: evidence from English. Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington, In.
J. McCarthy, Notes on Formalizing Context. In Proc. of 13th IJCAI conf.
J. Odijk, Text generation without planning. Paper presented at CLIN V, University of Twente.
J. Odijk, Generation of Coherent Monologues, in T. Andernach et al. (eds.), CLIN V: Proceedings of the Fifth CLIN Meeting, pp. 123–131, University of Enschedé, The Netherlands.
S. Prevost and M. Steedman, Specifying Intonation from Context for Speech Synthesis. Speech Communication.
M. T. Rosetta, Compositional Translation, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
J. Terken and S. Nooteboom, Opposite effects of accentuation and deaccentuation on verification latencies for given’ and new’ information. Language and Cognitive Processes 2, 3/4, pp.145–63.
N. Willems, R. Collier and J. ‘t Hart, A synthesis scheme for British English intonation. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84 (4).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van Deemter, K., Odijk, J. (2000). Formal and Computational Models of Context for Natural Language Generation. In: Bonzon, P., Cavalcanti, M., Nossum, R. (eds) Formal Aspects of Context. Applied Logic Series, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9397-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9397-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5472-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9397-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive