Talking About Meanings
Jonathan Ginzburg, King's College, London
Participants in a dialogue often refer to what the previous speaker just
said. In this paper I will look at actually occuring as well as
constructed examples like "What do you mean by ``a vacation''?" or simply
the "A vacation?" in response to a question such as
"Has Professor Anscombe taken a vacation this year?" or "Has
every member of staff taken a vacation this year?". I will consider how
to model the contextual update process effected by an utterance,
suggesting that phenomena such as the above necessitate adopting a
structured approach to utterance and meaning representation. Thus, I will
show that what can be talked about or queried can concern phonology,
lexical content or a function (e.g. from members of staff to vacations)
and it is important to be able to recover components of the previous
utterance in order to construct the meaning of such follow-up utterances.
I will suggest that using dependent record types together with a theory of
the dialogue game-board such as KOS (Ginzburg 1998) will allow us to
provide general rules for this.
(Joint work with Robin Cooper)