-- The Role of Resource Situations in Dialogue --
Hidetosi SIRAI, Ikumi IMANI, Ken-ichiro SHIRAI, Toshiyuki TONOIKE
School of Computer and Cognitive Sciences, Chukyo University
101 Tokodate, Kaizu-cho, Toyota, Aichi 470-03, Japan
e-mail: sirai@sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp
In everyday dialogue, we have to take into account both the situations where the participants are talking, and the previous contexts. They play an important role in interpreting a variety of linguistic phenomena such as anaphora and deletions. Especially the interpretation is affected by the knowledge of what is presupposed and what kind of plans the speaker has. Our goal is to build a pragmatic theory that explains where the speakers can use such linguistic tools and how the dialogue situation is built. Furthermore we are developing a computational model of dialogue which may be thought as a cognitive model of the dialogue participants. Our paper focuses on the role of resource situations in dialogue understanding. A variety of situations such as the discourse situations and the described situations are used as the resource situations. The resource situations can be defined as the situations which are used to pick up the referent of the anaphora, and whose supporting states of affairs are used to extend the discourse as the presuppositions. In the paper, we have analyzed the presupposition from the point of the resource situations, and have found there are constraints on the available resource situations. Actually they are in a close relationship with the accessibility conditions proposed in Discourse Representation Theory. In the future, we will formalize these constraints in the framework of Situation Semantics, and incorporate them into the computational model of dialogue understanding.
Keywords: Presupposition, Anaphora, Projection Problem, Resource Situations, Situation Semantics, Accessibility