A Prolegomenon to Situation Semantics

A PROLEGOMENON TO SITUATION SEMANTICS David J. Israel Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. Cambridge, MA 02238 ABSTRACT An attempt is made to prepare Computational Linguistics for Situation Semantics. I INTRODUCTION The editors of the AI Journal recently hit upon the nice notion of correspondents' columns. The basic idea was to solicit experts in various fields, both within and outside of Artificial Intelligence, to provide "guidance to important, interesting current literature" in their fields. For Philosophy, they made the happy choice of Dan Dennett; for natural language processing, the equally happy choice of Barbara Grosz. Each has so far contributed one column, and these early contributions overlap in one, and as it happens, only one, particular; to wit: Situation~manties. Witness Dennett: " " ~ t ~oplcln " Cis] the hottest new philosophical loglc...[is] in some ways a successor or rival to Montague semantics. And now Grosz: In recent work, Barwlse and Perry address the probZem [of what information from the context of an utterance affects which aspects of interpretation and how?] in the context of a proposed model theory of natural language, one that appears to be more compatible with the needs of AI than previous theories .... EI]t is of interest to work in natural-language processing for the kind of compositional semantics it ~ roposes, and the way in which it allows he contexts in which in an utterance is used to affect its interpretation. What is all the fuss about? I want to address this question, but rather indirectly. I want to situate situation semantics in "conceptual space" and draw some comparisons and contrasts between it and accounts in the style of Richard Montague. To this end, a few preliminary points are in order. A. The Present Situation First, as to the state of the Situation Semantics literature. There is as yet no published piece of the scope and detail of either "English as a Formal Language" or "The Proper Treatment of Ouantlficatlon in Ordinary English". Nor, of course, is there anything llke ~hat large body of work by philosophers and linguists - computational and otherwise - that has been produced from within the Montague paradigm. Montague's work was more or hess the first of its kind. It excited, quite justifiably, an extraordinary amount of interest t and has already inspired a distinguished body or work, some of it from within AI and Computational Linguistics. The latter can hardly be said for Situation Semantics (yet?). So what is there? Besides a few published papers, each of them containing at least one position since abandoned~ there is a book ~ Attitudes literally on the very verge of publication. This contains the philosophlcal/theoretlcal background of the program - The Big Picture. It also contains a very brief treatment of a very simple fragment of ALIASS. And what, the reader may well ask is ALIASS? An Artificial Language for lliustratlng Aspects of ~Ituation ~emantlcs, that's what. Moreover there is in the works a ceiiaboratlve effort, to be called Situations a n d …

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