An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation
Summary
Purely compositional semantics struggles because an utterance's meaning depends on context as well as syntax. Pragmatic choices, such as resolving a pronoun or fixing quantifier scope, often need information from syntactically distant parts of the sentence. Pollack and Pereira propose a framework that keeps most of the advantages of compositionality while letting these decisions happen in a flexible order.
Starting from least-commitment parse trees, each phrase receives a conditional interpretation. This pairs a context-independent sense with a set of assumptions about pragmatic processing still to be done. Declarative semantic-interpretation rules build these structures compositionally. Optional pragmatic-discharge rules then eliminate assumptions by consulting, and updating, a structured discourse context. An interpretation counts as complete once no assumptions remain.
The mechanism was implemented in Prolog inside the Candide knowledge-acquisition system. It handles interacting phenomena such as donkey sentences, where reference and quantification must be settled jointly. The work offers a principled middle ground between rigidly ordered and loosely controlled ways of combining semantics and pragmatics.
Key points
- Two kinds of assumptions. A conditional interpretation is a pair: a sense plus a set of assumptions.
- bind introduces a new parameter and constrains how it is bound.
- restrict further narrows an existing parameter.
- Two kinds of rules.
- Semantic-interpretation rules are obligatory. They look only at syntactic types and assumption types, never at constituent senses.
- Pragmatic-discharge rules are optional. They act as four-place relations that also update the context.
- Four-part discourse context.
- Immediate context supports intrasentential anaphora.
- Local context handles pronouns via centering (Grosz et al.).
- Global context is a focus stack used for definite anaphora.
- A knowledge base completes the structure.
- Implementation. The system is part of Candide, a multimodal tool for building procedural networks for the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS). It was applied to NASA space shuttle malfunction procedures.
- Control and positioning.
- Search uses depth-first exploration, early discharge, breadth-first search over alternative bindings, and bounds on assumption percolation.
- The approach generalizes Cooper storage and Woods's computational analogue of it.
- The authors contrast it with Pundit, which they see as overconstrained, and Tacitus, which they see as underconstrained.
Cite
@inproceedings{pollack1988integrated,
title = {{An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation}},
author = {Pollack, Martha E. and Pereira, Fernando C.N.},
booktitle = {26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
year = {1988},
doi = {10.3115/982023.982033},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/982023.982033}
}References
- A. V. Aho, R. Sethi, and J. D. Ullman. Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1985. find
- J. Barwise. Noun phrases, generalized quanti-tiers and anaphora. In P. G~xdenfors, editor, Generalized Quantifiers: Linguistic and Logical Approaches, pages 1-29, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1987. find
- J. Barwise and J. Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983. find
- J. Bresnan and R. Kaplan. Lexical-functional .grammar: a formal system for grammatical representation. In J. Bresnan, editor, The Mental Representation of Grammatical R~lations, pages 173-281, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982. find
- D. Caxter. Interpreting Anaphors in Natural Lan. guage Tezts. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, England, 1987. find
- R. Cooper. Quantification and Syntactic Theory. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1983. find
- S. Crain and M. Steedman. On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the psychological syntax processor. In D. Dowty, L. Karttunen, and A. Zwicky, editors, Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives, pages 320-358, Cambridge University Press,… find
- D. A. Dahl, M. S. Palmer, and R. J. Passonneau. Nominalizations in Pundit. In Proceedings of the ~4th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 131-139, Stanford, California, 1987. find
- P. Geach. Reference and Generality. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1962. find
- M. P. Georgeff and A. L. Lansky. Procedural knowledge. Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Knowledge Representation, 1383-1398, 1986. find
- B. J. Grosz. The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding. Technical Report 151, SRI International, Menlo Park, Ca., 1977. find
- B. J. Grosz, A. K. Joshi, and S. Weiustein. Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse. In Proveedings o] the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computa. tional Linguistics, pages 44-50, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983. find
- B. J. Grosz and C. L. Sidner. Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12(3):175-204, 1986. find our card
- F. Guenthner, H. Lehmann, and W. Schonfeld. A theory for the representation of knowledge. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 30(1):39-56, January 1986. find
- R. Harper, F. Honsel], and G. Plotkin. A framework for defining logics. In Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Cornell University, IEEE, Ithaca, New York, 1987. find
- J. R. Hobbs. Interpretation az abduction. In Proceedings of the £6th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, New York, 1988. find
- J. R. Hobbs. Overview of the TACITUS project. Computational Linguistics, 12(3), 1986. find
- H. Kamp. A theory of truth and semantic interpretation. In J. A. G. Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen, and M. B. J. Stokhoi~ editors, Formal Methods in the Study o] Language, pages 277-322, Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1981. find
- R. Montague. The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English. In R. H. Thomason, editor, Formal Philosphy, Yale University Press, 1973. find
- R. C. Moore. Problems in logical form. In Proceedings o] the 19th Meeting o] the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 117-124, Stanford, California, 1981. find
- M. S. Palmer, D. A. Dahl, R. J. Schiffman, L. Hirschman, M. Linebarger, and J. Dowding. Recovering implicit information. In Proceedings of the ~.~th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 10-19, New York, 1986. find
- F. C. Pereira- Logic for Natural Language Analysis. Technical Report 275, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, 1983. , find
- F.C. Pereira- Towards a deductive theory of sentence interpretation. Unpublished manuscript. find
- F.C. Pereira and M. E. Pollack. A compositional, declarative system for semaattic and pragmatic interpretation. In preparation. find
- G. D. Plotkin. A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics. Lecture notes DAIMI FN-19, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, September 1981. find
- L. K. Schubert and F. 3. Pelletier. From English to logic: context-free computation of 'conventional' logical translation. Computational Linguistics, 8(1):26-44, 1982. find
- P. Sells. Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories. Volume 3 of CSLI Lecture Not~, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 1985. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. find
- C. L. Sidner. Focusing in the comprehension of definite anaphora- In Computational Models of Discourse, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983. find
- B. L. Webber. So what can we talk about now? In Computational Models of Discourse, MIT Press, Cambrige, Ms., 1983. find
- W. A. Woods. Semantics and quantification in natural language question answering. In M. Yovits, editor, Advances in Computers, Vol. 17, pages 2-64, Academic Press, New York, New York, 1978. find
This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pollack-1988-integrated-framework-semantic-pragmatic-interpretation/