An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation

An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation 1 Martha E. Pollack Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Ave Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA Fernando C.N. Pereira Cambridge Computer Science Research Centre SRI International Suite 23, Millers Yard, Mill Lane Cambridge CB2 1RQ, England Abstract We report on a mechanism for semantic and prag- matic interpretation that has been designed to take advantage of the generally compositional na- ture of semantic analysis, without unduly con- straining the order in which pragmatic decisions are made. To achieve this goal, we introduce the idea of a conditional interpretation: one that de- pends upon a set of assumptions about subsequent pragmatic processing. Conditional interpretations are constructed compositionally according to a set of declaratively specified interpretation rules. The mechanism can handle a wide range of pragmatic phenomena and their interactions. 1 Introduction Compositional systems of semantic interpretation, while logically and computationally very attrac- tive [6,20,26], seem unable to cope with the fact that the syntactic form of aa utterance is not the only source of information about its mean- ing. Contextual information--information about the world and about the history of a discourse-- influences not only an utterance's meaning, but even its preferred syntactic analysis [3,5,7,16]. Of course, context also influences the interpretation (or meaning in context) of the utterance, in which, for example, referring expressions have been re- solved. One possible solution is to move to an integrated system of semantic and pragmatic interpretation, defined recursively on syntactic analyses that are 1 This research has been funded by DARPA under Con- tract N00039-84-C-0524, and by a gift from the Systems Development Foundation as part of a coordinated research effort with the Center for the Study of Language and In- formation, Stanford University. We would like to thank David Israel, FLay Perrault, and Stuart Shieber for their helpful discussions regarding this work. neutral about those decisions that depend upon context. In this approach, a least-commitment grammar may be used to produce neutral repre- sentations that can be reconfigured later. Such a grammar might, for example, leave quantifiers in place [30], attach all prepositional phrases low and right [22], and bracket to the right all com- pound nominals. 2 These neutral analyses can then serve as input to a system that produces inter- pretations (and not meanings) in a nearly com- positional manner, in that the interpretation of a phrase a is a function of the interpretations of its syntactic constituents together with its context of utterance. This model of semantic interpretation assumes that contextual information is available whenever it is needed for deciding among alternative inter- pretations. However, this is often not the case: questions about the interpretation of some con- stituent of an utterance might be answerable only when information about the interpretation of syn- tactically distant constituents becomes available. Familiar examples of this can be found, for in- stance, in sentences with quantifier scoping ambi- guities and in sentences that include intrasenten- tial anaphora. The so-called donkey sentences [9] exhibit both these …

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