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The ABC of Computational Pragmatics
Abstract
Introduction: general and computational pragmatics Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies the relations between linguistic phenomena and aspects of the context of language use. To understand these relations is of crucial importance in many areas of theoretical, computational, and applied linguistics. In theoretical linguistics, the analysis of such phenomena as anaphora, deixis, and tense requires taking properties into account of the context in which expressions exhibiting these phenomena can be used. Utterances which are context-dependent in such ways are called indexical. Bar-Hillel (1954) has argued that indexicality is pervasive in natural language, and speculated that more than 90% of all declarative utterances are indexical. Indexical expressions encode information about aspects of context: about objects introduced earlier in the discourse, about objects that form part of the physical and perceptual context, or about the (relative) time
... Fasold (1990, p. 119) regards the science of pragmatics as the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning. Some scholars used specific terms such as the study of literal, conventional or context-independent meaning Journal for the Study of English Linguistics ISSN 2329-7034 2019 versus non-literal, non-conventional or context-dependent meaning (Cole, 1981;Lyons, 1987;Black & Bunt, 2000;Kadmon, 2001;Recanati, 2004) to distinguish semantics and pragmatics and also to highlight the importance of pragmatics in terms of its context-independency in interpretation of meaning. Roberts (2004, p. 197) argues that -we complain if someone quotes what we say out of context because this may distort our intended meaning‖. ...
Previous mono-cultural and interlanguage pragmatic studies in Persian mainly focused on the 'strategy types' used in the structures of speech acts. However, the functions of these elements were discussed by few of them. Polite speech acts have been reported to be used with both genuine and ostensible meanings. Nevertheless, few sporadic studies were conducted to help distinguishing these two series of speech acts in Persian. In this study, attempt is made to highlight the importance of context in distinguishing between overt (direct) and actual (indirect) functions of four speech acts namely offer, invitation, apology and refusal collected from the soundtracks of Iranian films. In this study we propose that while the overt and actual functions of the genuine speech acts are the same, there is discrepancy in the case of ostensible speech acts. The results of this study highlight the importance of context in working out the meaning of Persian speech acts.
... An intuitive view is to consider the distinctions between the linguistic information formed by mor- phological, syntactic or textual material surrounding a word, and any other contextual information surrounding the utterance. Bunt and Black (2000) discuss the following non- exhaustive aspects of contextual information: ...
Social media content is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects, and past experiences. Most social media texts are short online conversational posts or comments that do not contain enough information for natural language processing (NLP) tools, as they are often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual information, including meta-data (e.g., the user’s profile, the social network of the user, and their interactions with other users). Exploiting such different types of context and their interactions makes the automatic processing of social media texts a challenging research task. Indeed, simply applying traditional text mining tools is clearly sub-optimal, as, typically, these tools take into account neither the interactive dimension nor the particular nature of this data, which shares properties with both spoken and written language. This special issue contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of these interactions to process social media data from a new perspective in discourse interpretation. This introduction first provides the necessary background to understand what context is from both the linguistic and computational linguistic perspectives, then presents the most recent context-based approaches to NLP for social media. We conclude with an overview of the papers accepted in this special issue, highlighting what we believe are the future directions in processing social media texts. © 2018, 2018 Association for Computational Linguistics Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
... This approach is however problematic. It is analogous to a discussion in (Bunt and Black 2000) -by reducing to mere convention the reason why 'There is a howling gale in here!' is understood as a command to close the window, we are oversimpli-fying and missing out more important reasoning processes, including context. Similarly, if we were to find a list of commonsense correlations like 'fit into(x, y) ⊕ large(y)' through corpus mining, we are ripping the words out of context and may be missing out important reasoning processes. ...
Different aspects and approaches to commonsense reasoning have been investigated in order to provide solutions for the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC). The vast complexities of natural language processing (parsing, assigning word sense, integrating context, pragmatics and world-knowledge, ...) give broad appeal to systems based on statistical analysis of corpora. However, solutions based purely on learning from corpora are not currently able to capture the semantics underlying the WSC - which was intended to provide problems whose solution requires knowledge and reasoning, rather than statistical analysis of superficial lexical features. In this paper we consider the WSC as a means for highlighting challenges in the field of commonsense reasoning more generally. We begin by discussing issues with current approaches to the WSC. Following this we outline some key challenges faced, in particular highlighting the importance of dealing with pragmatics. We then argue for an alternative approach which favours the use of knowledge bases where the deep semantics of the different interpretations of commonsense terms are formalised. Furthermore, we suggest using heuristic approaches based on pragmatics to determine appropriate configurations of both reasonable interpretations of terms and necessary assumptions about the world.
... pl. Koskenniemi 1983;Karttunen-Beesley 2005); de éppen ezen az alkalmazott nyelvészeti területen bizonyosodott be néhány évtized alatt egyértelműen, hogy szemantikai és pragmatikai leírás nélkül elképzelhetetlen az emberre jellemző nyelvhasználat szimulálása (Bunt-Black 2000). S az is bebizonyosodott, hogy ezek nélkül a területek nélkül az elméleti nyelvtudomány csonka marad. ...
A folyóirat címével és tartalmával a nyelvtudomány két olyan területére, a szemantikára és a pragmatikára szeretnénk felhívni a figyelmet, amelyek mára már bebizonyították önálló nyelvészeti kutatási területekként való létjogosultságukat a modern nyelvészetben. Ámbár a világban léteznek szemantikai és pragmatikai témájú cikkeket megjelentető igen színvonalas folyóiratok, s ámbár Magyarországon is vannak elsősorban szemantikával vagy pragmatikával foglalkozó kutatók, kifejezetten szemantikai-pragmatikai profilú magyar nyelvű folyóirat pillanatnyilag nem létezik. A Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat első számát a 2014. április 11-én a Pragmatika Centrum és a Szegedi Tudományegyetem Általános Nyelvészeti Tanszéke által Szegeden megrendezett Újdonságok a szemantikai és pragmatikai kutatásokban c. konferencia előadásaiból készült tanulmányok megjelentetésének szenteljük.
The aims of this paper are to detect the most problematic issues related to dialogue act annotation in speech corpora and to define basic categories of dialogue acts. I critically examine and test generic schemes that represent different lines of dialogue act annotation: AMI, DART, ISO 24617–2 and SWBD-DAMSL. It is found that the most problematic issues regarding dialogue act annotation are related to the distinction between the semantic and pragmatic meanings of utterances, the annotation of metadiscourse, and the adequacy and informativeness of the tagset. The identified basic dialogue act categories are information providing, information seeking, actions, social acts and metadiscourse. The findings help improve dialogue act annotation.
Persian-English subtitling of Iranian films deals with the challenges of understanding and transferring ostensible speech acts (OSAs). Both linguis- tic and cultural variations of these elements in Persian and English are expected to create serious difficulties for subtitlers. Although few studies with pragmatics approach have been conducted to interpret the meaning of Persian OSAs, they have been practically ignored in the fields of translation and subtitling. To fill this gap, this study aims to descriptively investigate the transference of the meaning of 80 Persian OSAs from selected Iranian films. It also analyses perceptions of 106 target text audiences of subtitled OSAs by examining their level of comprehension of 14 subtitled OSAs and the effec- tive factors on their understandings. Finally based on the findings emerged from the descriptive and survey analyses, this study proposes a guideline for Persian-English on assisting the transfer of the intended meaning of OSAs.
Narrative text is an important component of communication in health care, including patient-specific information in health record reports and notes and general biomedical knowledge papers, textbooks and web resources. Retrieval of information from such sources can be accomplished with keyword indexing but this approach fails to distinguish between texts that discuss a topic versus those that merely mention it. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques seek to analyze narrative text to make these distinctions and even to find instances where a concept is discussed but not explicitly mentioned. Previously, grammar-based methods were based on parsing sentences into their structure to infer semantics. Machine-learning methods are now being applied that can infer semantics through techniques such as statistical pattern recognition. Regular expression, rule bases, neural networks and word embeddings are among approaches that are improving the ability of automated systems to carry out successful language understanding, information extraction and question answering.
Context-dependent meaning recognition in natural language utterances is one of the key problems of computational pragmatics. Abductive reasoning seems apt for model-ing and understanding these phenomena. In fact, it presents observations through hypotheses, allowing us to understand subtexts and implied meanings without exact deductions. For this reason in this paper, we are going to explore abductive reasoning and context modeling in human-robot interaction. Rather than a radical inferential approach, we assumed a conventional approach towards context-depending meanings, i.e, they are conventionally encoded rather than inferred from the utterances. In order to address the problem, a case study is presented, analyzing whether such a system could manage correctly these linguistic phenomena. The results obtained confirm the validity of a conventional approach in context modeling and, on this basis, further models are proposed to work around the limitations of the case study.
The definition and scope of computational linguistics are reconstructed to distinguish it with other interdisciplinary disciplines like mathematical pragmatics, formal pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, etc. Meanwhile, the position of computational pragmatics and its relationship with other disciplines are displayed in this paper. Then, we reviewed the research status of computational pragmatics in China and the world, finding out the current study of computational pragmatics is still in its infancy, awaiting further research in four aspects: discipline construction, philosophy and methodology, fundamental theory, and application. Literatures indicate that computational pragmatics plays a vital role in both theory for a lot of disciplines and applications in our life.
This paper will try to evaluate the state of the art in semantic representation techniques as far as they are used in speech understanding systems. It will not deal with knowledge representation techniques in general, because only some of them are used and are even usable in speech environment. First, a scetch of the problem domain will be given: Recognition levels, search spaces and system design decisions are outlined, and from this, the task of linguistic analysis procedures is derived. Second, existing techniques to incorporate semantic information into the Speech Understanding task are presented and discussed, like statistics, semantic markers, semantic grammars etc. Third, two approaches for Speech Understanding are discussed: predicate logic as representation as used in the SPIC0S system, and semantic frames as used in the CMU-DARPA project. At the end, two proposals of possible system architectures are presented.
Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force.- Perlocutions.- Pragmatic Entailment and Questions.- Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood.- Yes-No Questions as Wh-Questions.- Syntactic Meanings.- Situational Context and Illocutionary Force.- Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connectives in Natural Language.- Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives, Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-Value.- The Background of Meaning.- Towards a Pragmatically Based Theory of Meaning.- Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating Speech Acts.- Telling the Facts.- Methodological Remarks on Speech Act Theory.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.
1 Another important source for the interest in underspecification is lexical semantics. Example (2) is a representative for a large field of ambiguity phenomena, which are conventionally classified as lexical ambiguities, but differ from trivial cases like the homonyms bank or pen in several important ways. 1 Earlier, but less influential research on underspecification was performed in the phliqa project at Philips Research Labs, where it seems that the concept of `meta-variables' was actually discovered; see e.g. Bronnenberg et al. (1979); Landsbergen & Scha (1979); Bunt (1984; 1985). boek-pinkal.tex; 27/08/1999; 13:09; p.1 33 H. Bunt and R. Muskens (eds.) Computing Meaning. Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht 1999, 33--55.. 34 MANFRED PINKAL (2) John began the book Rather than locating the source of ambiguity of sentence (2) in the verb b