On dialogue modelling, language processing dynamics, and linguistic knowledge

Abstract:

With the ever-increasing work on context-dependence, work on ellipsis has inevitably come to join the ranks of core context-dependency phenomena. This has led to consequent growth of interest in dialogue, with its rampant display of elliptical fragments, structures that are essentially underspecified as regards the contribution they provide, needing fine-grained details of the dialogue context for their interpretation. In this talk, we argue that once the remit of linguistic explanation is expanded to include dialogue data, we need to adopt grammar formalisms that directly reflect the dynamics of incremental growth of interpretation. As we shall show with corpus and experimental data, conversational dialogue demonstrates that the model of context presumed in utterance processing needs to be incrementally evolving, structural, and even sensitive to the multiple patterns arising during the process of interpretation.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Dialogue modelling
• Dynamic Syntax

Year:

2010

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the Linguistic Evidence 2010 Conference

Address:

Tübingen, Germany

Organization:

University of Tübingen

Month:

February