Invited Speakers
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Keynote:Discourse Interpretation in ContextJerry Hobbs Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, California |
In interpreting an utterance, context is the information external to the utterance that impinges on its interpretation. Interpreting discourse using weighted abduction is a matter of finding the lowest-cost proof of the logical form, given a knowledge base encoding general commonsense knowledge as well as facts specific to a situation. As such, abduction is a good framework for involving context in interpretation. In this talk I will give several examples of interpretation in contexts of various sorts, including task context and availability of resources for performing the task, visual context in interpreting transcripts of news broadcasts, and the interpretation of the text and hypothesis in the context of each other in the Recognizing Textual Entailment task.
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Keynote:Modelling Context-Dependence: Ellipsis in Conversational DialogueRuth Kempson, King's College London/ Department of Philosophy, United Kingdom. |
In conversation, we interactively build up structures together, with free switching of speaker/hearer roles at both sub- and supra-sentential levels. Current static "sententialist" grammars provide a poor basis from which to explain this phenomenon: indeed they rest content with bifurcation between grammar-internal and discourse properties, failing to provide an explanatory basis not only for such "split" utterances, but also for the phenomenon of context-dependence in general. Addressing this challenge head on, I use ellipsis in conversational dialogue as a test-case for promoting a grammar formalism (Dynamic Syntax) in which underspecification and incremental information-growth following the dynamics of processing form the core structural notion. From this perspective, richly structured and evolving concepts of context and content become available, and the patterns of ellipsis displayed in conversational dialogue (including split utterances) follow immediately. In closing I explore the significance of these results for language modelling.
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Keynote:Explicit, Generic, and Social ContextPaul Holleis, DOCOMO Euro-Labs, Germany. |
Many researchers and practitioners have used a variety of specific instances of context of a user or an object in order to make products and applications (look) more intelligent and fit to the user's request. However, most types of context and context acquisition techniques are still less then perfect. This makes it a rich field of research but, from a commercial point of view, a myriad of issues still exists. In order to overcome some of those, it is necessary to remove some of the complexity, abstract from some of the specificity, and look at new perspectives of context which I will promote as explicit, generic, and social context, respectively.