Presupposition Resolution With Discourse Information Structures

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Date

2000

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Journal Issue

Abstract

An approach to resolving a number of presuppositional phenomena, including definite descriptions and pronominal anaphora, is described within the larger context of an architecture for query-based, task-oriented human/computer dialogue. The model of discourse context employed assumes that discourse structure is organized around a stack of questions under discussion, which plays an important role in narrowing the search space for referents and other presupposed information. The algorithms of individual presuppositional operators for maintaining discourse structures are presented and illustrated in several example dialogues in which human users interact with an agent in order to make hotel reservations. The overall architecture is compared to SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory), in terms of efficiency and ease of implementation.

Description

Keywords

Citation

Working Papers in Linguistics, no. 54 (2000), 25-58.