Reconstruction of Messages

Abstract

Following the model developed here, information exchange through natural language functions as follows: a speaker sends a message by uttering a word or a sequence of words. The message denotes either a proposition or a question, regardless of whether the words form a complete sentence. A recipient recognises some of the uttered words; he might even recognise all of them. On the basis of which words he recognises, and on the basis of his knowledge of the discourse context, he tries to reconstruct the entire message as a sentence of QL. For this, he translates the recognised expressions to QL and, eventually, applies context-sensitive or context-insensitive operations of semantic enrichment. It may happen that by doing so the recipient can reconstruct several non-equivalent messages. Each of these messages can be evaluated on its contextual adequacy. The recipient possesses a representation of the discourse participants’ common ground. (That is, he makes assumptions about the common ground; these assumptions can eventually be false.) The criteria of adequacy describe how a reconstructed message should relate to this common ground representation. If a reconstructed message is considered inadequate, the recipient can either reject the reconstructed message (and possibly choose a different reconstruction), or he can accommodate his representation of the common ground, thereby “making” the message adequate. Both the possibility of reconstructing and the possibility of accommodating are restricted, so that a given utterance cannot be interpreted in any arbitrary way. Ultimately, a recipient can update his common ground representation with the reconstructed message.