******* Language, Cognition, and Computation Lecture Series *******

 

Title                     Interpreting Vague Utterances in Context

Speaker                Matthew Stone

Affiliation             Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Rutgers

Date                     Friday, May 7, 2004

Time                    2:00pm

Location               E15-070 (Bartos Theater)

 

Abstract      

 

We use the interpretation of vague scalar predicates like "small" as

an illustration of the ability of systematic semantic models of

dialogue context to derive useful, fine-grained utterance

interpretations from radically underspecified semantic forms.  Our

account involves two principles.  We model pragmatic reasoning as a

general process that infers consistent collaborative intentions to

explain agents' contributions to joint activity.  We interpret vague

predicates by recovering salient scales and relevant distinctions

along them from the dialogue context.  Given this framework, we can

infer implicit standards of comparison for vague scalar predicates

through completely general pragmatics, yet closely constrain the

intended meaning to within a natural range.  Our account connects

closely with dynamic models from formal semantics, but we have

implemented it exactly in a natural language interface for describing

spatial actions.

 

(The talk presents joint work with David DeVault, Rutgers.)

 

 

Bio

 

Matthew Stone is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer

Science and Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers, the State

University of New Jersey.  He got his PhD in Computer and Information

Science at University of Pennsylvania, working under Mark Steedman in

the Computational Linguistics Lab and the Institute for Research in

Cognitive Science.  His research centers around computational

cognitive models of natural language meaning and aims to characterize

how meaning in conversation originates in and depends on

interlocutors' collaborative real-world action.  His work therefore

bridges computational logic, theories of agency and intention from

artificial intelligence and philosophy, computational models of

embodied action, and approaches to discourse context and semantic

representation from formal and computational linguistics.  Recently,

he has served on the Program Committee for IJCAI 2003, as the Tutorial

Forum Chair of AAAI 2004, and program co-chair for TAG+ 2004, the

Seventh International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related

Formalisms.