Utterance and Objective: Issues in Natural Language Communication

Abstract

Two premises, reflected in the title underlie the perspective from which I will consider research in natural language processing in this paper. First, progress on building computer systems that process natural languages in any meaningful sense (i.e., systems that interact reasonably with people in natural language) requires considering language as part of a larger communicative situation In this larger situation, the participants in a conversation and their states of mind are as important to the interpretation of an utterance as the linguistic expressions from which it is formed. A central concern when language is considered as communication is its function in building and using shared models of the world. Indeed, the notion of a shared model is inherent in the word "communicate" which is derived from the Latin communicare, "to make common."

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1979
Accession Number
ADA458907

Entities

People

  • Barbara J. Grosz

Organizations

  • SRI International

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Availability
  • Classification
  • Computers
  • Contracts
  • Formal Languages
  • Information Operations
  • Instructions
  • Language
  • Monitoring
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Security
  • Standards

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation