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Grammar resources for modelling dialogue dynamically

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Abstract

This paper argues that by analysing language as a mechanism for growth of information (Cann et al. in The Dynamics of Language, Elsevier, Oxford, 2005; Kempson et al. in Dynamic Syntax, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001), not only does a unitary basis for ellipsis become possible, otherwise thought to be irredeemably heterogeneous, but also a whole range of sub-types of ellipsis, otherwise thought to be unique to dialogue, emerge as natural consequences of use of language in context. Dialogue fragment types modelled include reformulations, clarification requests, extensions, and acknowledgements. Buttressing this analysis, we show how incremental use of fragments serves to progressively narrow down the otherwise mushrooming interpretational alternatives in language use, and hence is central to fluent conversational interaction. We conclude that, by its ability to reflect dialogue dynamics as a core phenomenon of language use, a grammar with inbuilt parsing dynamics opens up the potential for analysing language as a mechanism for communicative interaction.

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Notes

  1. There are two main reasons for the storage of words: firstly, there is the fact that people can remember them, at least in the short term; secondly, word/action pairs need to be available for the modelling of lexical/syntactic alignment (see Pickering and Garrod 2004; Purver et al. 2006). A reviewer points out that recall of words (qua phonological units) decays faster than content (but cf. Keenan et al. 1977; Kintsch and Bates 1977). To integrate this assumption, to the extent that it holds, in the DS model we have to introduce mechanisms that model decay of information in context (see e.g. Lewis and Vasishth 2005), an extension which is in any case required for modelling decay of accessibility of competing antecedents for anaphora/ellipsis.

  2. The antecedent of an elliptical utterance is whatever in the previous discourse/context provides the necessary “completion” for its understanding; thus in e.g. (1b) the string seen Mary is the antecedent because it provides whatever material is needed for the resolution of the ellipsis site provided by the auxiliary haven’t.

  3. Further cases indicate ellipsis construal sensitivity to morphological idiosyncracies (see Cann et al. 2007; Ginzburg and Cooper 2004; Morgan 1973, 1989; Purver et al. 2006, for discussion).

  4. The point is that even if such a string might be taken as grammatical it does not carry the intended meaning.

  5. See e.g. (Levinson 1992, 1983; Schlangen 2003; Sperber and Wilson 1995).

  6. See e.g. (Clark 1996).

  7. Incidentally such interruptive conversational exchanges pose problems for another type of “grammar of conversation”, namely, models which describe turn-taking organisation and adjacency pair structure, see e.g. (Sacks et al. 1974; Schegloff and Sacks 1973).

  8. The symbol appearing in these annotations is the Kleene star used to indicate zero or more iterations of the dominance relation.

  9. E-type anaphora: (Evans 1980) and many others since.

  10. Relative scope is not expressed by the hierarchical structure of the tree but involves incremental collection of scope-dependency constraints (either lexically or structurally determined) with the output formulae and the set of scope dependencies being subject to an evaluation algorithm determining their combined effect on interpretation.

  11. The account of names and definites is simplified here for exegesis, but see Cann et al. (2005).

  12. 〈L −1 〉Tn(n) is an address annotation indicating that Tn(n) is the node from where the link relation originates.

  13. τ-terms, (τ,x,Px), are the terms contributed by universal quantifiers like every.

  14. Given the DS concept of linked trees projecting propositional content, we anticipate that this mechanism will be extendable to fragment construal involving inference (see e.g. Schlangen 2003; Schlangen and Lascarides 2003).

  15. DS makes available variable strategies for the processing of such fragments, we simplify the presentation here but for some alternatives see (Gargett et al. 2008; Kempson et al. 2007).

  16. For simplicity of illustration we do not show the internal tree-structure of epsilon/iota terms on the graphics.

  17. Items like yeah have a metacommunicative function in dialogue (backchannels) and are not therefore included as part of the main DS propositional content.

  18. ?〈↓*〉x is the requirement indicating that a copy of the variable at the link-initiating node must appear inside the linked tree.

  19. In fact, given the incrementality of DS, each single word is uttered individually upon the subsumption check but we suppress these steps here for simplicity.

  20. We ignore here any discussion of question-hood, apart from the annotation Q on the relevant nodes, since our emphasis is on common mechanisms. See Kempson et al. (2007) for preliminary discussion.

  21. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out this tree will not include the linked node which led to the inconsistency so this context tree can now be extended consistently to extend the description of the particular individual intended.

  22. It is notably harder to recover ellipsis construal appropriately across an intervening utterance, but it is by no means impossible (see Healey and Eshghi in prep).

  23. There is a range of results linking action and perception within a common framework (e.g. Hommel et al. 2001; Hurley 2005), on how various cognitive mechanisms for “sharing” representations may facilitate joint action (Sebanz et al. 2006a, b), on research into common representations underlying both speaking and hearing (e.g. Liberman and Mattingly 1989; Liberman and Whalen 2000), and on imitation as “behavior parsing” (Byrne 1999, 2003). Research into such parity between action and perception is now well-established (see e.g. Billard and Schal 2006), and this is beginning to be reflected in work on the role of such mechanisms in communication (e.g. Arbib 2005).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for ongoing feedback to Ronnie Cann, Patrick Healey, Greg James Mills, Chris Howes, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, Graham White. For suggestions and comments to: Robin Cooper, Arash Eshghi, Jonathan Ginzburg, Staffan Larsson, Raquel Fernández and an anonymous reviewer. Mistakes however have to be seen as our own. This work was supported by grants ESRC RES-062-23-0962 and Leverhulme F07 04OU, and reflects ongoing work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    Andrew Gargett, Eleni Gregoromichelaki & Ruth Kempson

  2. Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Matthew Purver

  3. Science and Technology Research Institute, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, AL10 9AB, UK

    Yo Sato

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  1. Andrew Gargett
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Correspondence to Eleni Gregoromichelaki.

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Gargett, A., Gregoromichelaki, E., Kempson, R. et al. Grammar resources for modelling dialogue dynamically. Cogn Neurodyn 3, 347–363 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-009-9088-y

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