| { |
| "paper_id": "J98-2014", |
| "header": { |
| "generated_with": "S2ORC 1.0.0", |
| "date_generated": "2023-01-19T02:53:33.599563Z" |
| }, |
| "title": "Referential Communication Tasks", |
| "authors": [ |
| { |
| "first": "George", |
| "middle": [], |
| "last": "Yule", |
| "suffix": "", |
| "affiliation": {}, |
| "email": "" |
| } |
| ], |
| "year": "", |
| "venue": null, |
| "identifiers": {}, |
| "abstract": "", |
| "pdf_parse": { |
| "paper_id": "J98-2014", |
| "_pdf_hash": "", |
| "abstract": [], |
| "body_text": [ |
| { |
| "text": "small format (125 pages), a general survey of experimental settings and scientific background on communication studies centered on specific activities in which the speakers are observed for their ability to achieve tasks rather than solely for their linguistic productions. It thus offers a basic and introductory insight to research and experiments that put the notion of reference at the core of their interest. Here the focus is generally on experiments in the broad field of L2 studies. Though the author does not really insist on the theoretical backgrounds of the different studies being presented, it is made very clear that the language that is being described is that spoken spontaneously in situations (especially in L2 contexts) in which speakers might not even be able to correctly designate the objects they want to refer to and therefore need to develop linguistic and other communicative strategies to circumvent their difficulties. It is thus important to remember that reference is not simply \"some kind of connection between words and things\" but rather, as stated in the first chapter of the book (\"Overview\"), \"an action through which a speaker (or writer) uses linguistic forms to enable a listener (or reader) to identify something.\"", |
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| "text": "Apart from the second chapter (\"The development of (L1) referential communication\"), which is too short to be really informative, the book is centered on three main sections, dedicated respectively to the main trends, the experimental settings, and the study viewpoints associated with referential communication tasks. First, Chapter 3 (\"Principles and distinctions\") lists the main parameters--from the point of view of what is to be elicited as well as the task format-that are to lead an experimenter towards the design of a specific experimental setting adapted to his research interest. The au-thor then presents (Chapter 4, \"Materials and procedures\") in a rather exhaustive way the different kinds of situations that have been used in the literature to conduct referential task studies, ranging from object identification to instructional map tasks (which are well known in the computational linguistics community). Finally, Chapter 5 (\"Analytic frameworks\") quickly surveys the possible viewpoints that the researcher may take to consider the linguistic productions resulting from the different experimental frameworks presented in the book, insisting on communication strategies, interactive repair mechanisms, and communicative outcomes.", |
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| "text": "Even though the book is far from presenting a theoretical insight into the field, as a whole it provides a wide and extensive overview of experimental materials and principles that, considered from the point of view of computational linguistics, would be of interest to anyone interested in dialogue studies in which reference plays a central role.", |
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| "text": "Since the book seems to be intended to provide the basics of some research methodology, one may regret that the literature that is mentioned contains so few associated basic readings, which could have been most valuable for young researchers starting in the field of communication research. Still, its small format makes it worth reading and even to have within reach for those of us who at some point or another have to deal with, or even produce, experimental data. We use vague language without difficulty. Yet, if asked whether a vague word applies to a particular object, we might be at a loss. Is that man tall? If he is 195 cm, clearly yes. If he is 165 cm, clearly no. But in many intermediate cases, we simply cannot say. Vagueness also presents theoretical problems, among them the so-called sorites paradoxes. It would appear that a man who is a fraction of a millimeter shorter than a tall man is tall. But then, with repeated application of this principle, it seems to follow, paradoxically, that since a 195 cm man is tall, so is a 165 cm man.", |
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| "text": "The difficulties surrounding vagueness have ramifications within artificial intelligence. We might wish to include vague representations in knowledge bases, and in computational linguistics we will certainly have to come to terms with vagueness. Questions immediately arise about how to represent vague sentences and what to infer from them. To answer these questions, an account of the meanings of vague sentences is needed.", |
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| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
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| "text": "Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith have compiled a collection of classic papers on vagueness. Three ancient writings provide historical perspective; fourteen others chart the development of the contemporary discussion of vagueness throughout this century. Contributions that might be of special interest to researchers in artificial intelligence include Kit Fine's \"Vagueness, truth and logic,\" which sets out the supervaluational approach to vagueness. This approach is supposed to account for vagueness while preserving classical logic. Kenton Machina defends the approach to vagueness through fuzzy logic that was pioneered by Zadeh and Goguen. Dorothy Edgington criticizes this approach and suggests an alternative manyvalued treatment. Max Black explores the idea that the applicability of a predicate to an object is a matter of degree, determined by the applicability judgments of the language community at large. Carl Hempel provides a pointed criticism of his proposal. Other selections are philosophically rich but might only indirectly address the concerns of the artificial intelligence community.", |
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| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "Keefe and Smith contribute a substantial introductory chapter that expounds and evaluates these and other approaches. They discuss the sorites paradox and its significance for logical accounts of vagueness; they describe the epistemic view, according to which vague predicates are sharply defined but speakers are necessarily uninformed about their boundaries; they evaluate the various alternatives to this view, including supervaluational accounts, three-valued accounts, and multivalued accounts; and they outline the recent debate over the existence of vague objects. The chapter extensively refers to rel-evant material that does not appear in the anthology.", |
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| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "This balanced and comprehensive collection will be a standard reference for many years to come. \"Throughout the history of ideas, various branches of philosophy have spun off into the natural sciences, including physics, biology, and perhaps most recently, cognitive psychology. A central theme of this collection is that the philosophy of language, or at least a core portion of it, has matured to the point where it is now being spun off into linguistic theory. Each section of the book contains historical (twentieth-century) readings and, where available, recent attempts to apply the resources of contemporary linguistic theory to the problems under discussion. This approach helps to root the naturalization project in the leading questions of analytic philosophy. Although the older readings predate the current naturalization project, they help to lay its conceptual foundations. The main sections of the book, each of which is preceded by an introduction paperbound, ISBN 0-7923-4451-0, $49.00, \u00a329.00, Dfl 90.00 \"Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic, and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, lead to two central claims.", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
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| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
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| "text": "(1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct logical form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is further constrained by the semantics of the interacting operators. The arguments are developed using minimalist syntax, generalized quantify", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
| "ref_spans": [], |
| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "[sic] theory, discourse representation theory, and algebraic semantics.", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
| "ref_spans": [], |
| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "\"The contributors (Beghelli, Ben-Shalom, Doetjes, Farkas, Guti@rrez Rexach, Honcoop, Stabler, Stowell, Szabolcsi, and Zwarts) make tightly related theoretical assumptions and focus on related empirical phenomena, which include the direct and inverse scope of quantifiers, distributivity, negation, modal and intensional contexts, weak islands, event-related readings, interrogatives, wh/quantifier interactions, and Hungarian \"The book contains a collection of eight survey papers written by some of the most excellent researchers in foundations of knowledge representation and reasoning. It covers topics like theories of uncertainty, nonmonotonic and causal reasoning, logic programming, abduction, inductive logic programming, description logics, complexity in artificial intelligence, and model-based diagno-", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
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| "section": "--Laurent Romary, Loria-CNRS", |
| "sec_num": null |
| } |
| ], |
| "back_matter": [ |
| { |
| "text": "sis. It thus provides an up-to-date coverage of recent approaches to some of the most challenging problems underlying knowledge representation and artificial intelligence in", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
| "ref_spans": [], |
| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "annex", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "The contents of the volume are as follows: \"Non-standard theories of uncertainty in plausible reasoning\" by Didier Dubois and Henri Prade \"Probabilistic foundations of reasoning with conditionals\" by Judea Pearl and Mois~s Goldszmidt \"Foundations of logic programming\" by Vladimir Lifschitz \"Abductive theories in artificial intelligence\" by Kurt Konolige \"Inductive logic programming\" by Stefan Wrobel \"Reasoning in description logics\" by Francesco M. Donini, Maurizio Lenzerini, Daniele Nardi, and Andrea Schaerf \"Artificial intelligence: A computational perspective\" by Bernhard Nebel \"The consistency-based approach to automated diagnosis of devices\" by Oskar Dressler and Peter Struss", |
| "cite_spans": [], |
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| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "general.'--From the publisher's announcement", |
| "sec_num": null |
| } |
| ], |
| "bib_entries": {}, |
| "ref_entries": { |
| "FIGREF1": { |
| "type_str": "figure", |
| "uris": null, |
| "text": "Signiform (www.signiform.com), 1997, x+343 pp; spiralbound, ISBN 0-9660746-0-2, $50.00 \"The ThoughtTreasure platform was created with the long-term goal of human-level comprehension in mind. It brings together much of the research and experience in linguistics and artificial intelligence to date, serving as a foundation for future work. The platform contains 135,000 lines of ANSI C code and concise-format database entries representing over 20,000 concepts associated with over 50,000 English and French words and phrases. It includes a syntactic and semantic parser, an English and French generator, and a chatterbot front end enabling the user to converse with the program. Thought-Treasure, including the source code, is available for free on the Internet. It runs on both PCs and Unix systems.\"--From the a u thor's introduction Semantica (NeXTStep edition, version 1.0) Richard K. Larson, David S. Warren, Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva, O. Patricia Gomez, and Konstantinos Sagonas (State University of New York, Stony Brook and Catholic University of Leuven) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997, xiii+179 pp and 3.5-inch diskettes for PCs and NeXTStations running NeXTStep 3.2 or higher; hardbound, ISBN 0-262-62117-7, $25.0O \"Semantica is ... a new software application that allows the user to explore the semantic structure of language in an engaging, interactive way. The program, which was produced as part of a National Science Foundation initiative for improving linguistics in-struction, is designed to be used with [the authors'] Syntactica [The MIT Press, 1996], a tool for studying natural language syntax. Semantica provides a simple graphical interface for creating semantic theories, viewing the truth conditions that those theories assign to phrase markers created in Syntactica, and for testing those truth conditions in a pictorially represented world.'--From the publisher's announcement Readings in the Philosophy of Language Peter Ludlow (editor) (State University of New York, Stony Brook) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997, xviii+1073 pp; paperbound, ISBN 0-262-62114-2, $35.00", |
| "num": null |
| }, |
| "FIGREF2": { |
| "type_str": "figure", |
| "uris": null, |
| "text": ", are 'Language and Meaning,' 'Logical Form and Grammatical Form,' 'Definite and Indefinite Descriptions,' 'Names,' 'Demonstratives,' and 'Attitude Reports'.\"--Froin thepublisher Academic Publishers (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, edited by Gennaro Chierchia, Pauline Jacobson, and Francis J. Pelletier, volume 65), 1997, xxi+466 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-7923-4446-4, $170.00, \u00a399.00, Dfl 270.00;", |
| "num": null |
| }, |
| "FIGREF3": { |
| "type_str": "figure", |
| "uris": null, |
| "text": "syntax. An introduction to the formal semantics background is provided.'--From the publisher's announcementPrinciples of Knowledge RepresentationGerhard Brewka (editor) (Technical University of Vienna) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications and The European Association for Logic, Language and Information, 1996, xvi+318 pp; distributed by Cambridge University Press; hardbound, ISBN 1-57586-057-0, $59.95; paperbound, ISBN 1-57586-056-2, $22.95", |
| "num": null |
| } |
| } |
| } |
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