Online research in philosophy

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” of the text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision.

This paper develops a general approach to contextual reasoning in natural language processing. Drawing on the view of natural language interpretation as abduction (Hobbs et al., 1993), we propose that interpretation provides an explanation of how an utterance creates a new discourse context in which its interpreted content is both true and promi- nent. Our framework uses dynamic theories of semantics and pragmatics, formal theories of context, and models of attentional state. We describe and illustrate a Prolog implementation.

Based on the premise that what is relevant, consistent, or true may change from context to context, a formal framework of relevance and context is proposed in which • contexts are mathematical entities • each context has its own language with relevant implication • the languages of distinct contexts are connected by embeddings • inter-context deduction is supported by bridge rules • databases are sets of formulae tagged with deductive histories and the contexts they belong to • abduction and revision are supported by a notion of consistency of formulae and sets of formulae which are relative to a context, and which can, in turn, be seen as constituents of agendas.

This authored book provides an innovative and systematic account of key debates within the social psychology of knowledge, using the theory of social representations as a guide. This account is then elaborated and integrated into a conceptually coherent theoretical framework to further the social psychological dimensions of the relationship between representations, knowledge and context. Jovchelovitch highlights the social psychological components of the process of knowledge formation and their impact in the constitution of communities, culture and public spheres. Whilst this exploration contributes to an understanding of the genesis, logic and function of knowledge in social life, it also shows that context is essential to understanding the dynamics of representation and emphasises the fundamental unity between the two. This book offers a significant and stimulating contribution to the field of social representations and will make essential reading for those wanting to follow this debate at thecutting edge of social, cultural and developmental psychology as well as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.

The papers in this volume represent the views of a range of experts in a variety of language-related disciplines on the role which context plays in language learning and language understanding. The authors provide various theoretical constructs which help impose order on the apparent chaos of contextual factors which may have an influence on the production and comprehension of speech events. They focus on a variety of types of context, including the context established by different speech communities, interpersonal contexts, the classroom context, and the context provided by the linguistic code itself. The papers illustrate how the treatment of context varies across the disciplines of linguistics, historical stylistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Each paper is prefaced by an editorial introduction to help the reader trace out common themes and points of conflict.

The use of context can considerably facilitate reasoning by restricting the beliefs reasoned upon to those relevant and providing extra information specific to the context. Despite the use and formalization of context being extensively studied both in AI and ML, context has not been much utilized in agents. This may be because many agents are only applied in a single context, and so these aspects are implicit in their design, or it may be that the need to explicitly encode information about various contexts is onerous. An algorithm to learn the appropriate context along with knowledge relevant to that context gets around these difficulties and opens the way for the exploitation of context in agent design. The algorithm is described and the agents compared with agents that learn and apply knowledge in a generic way within an artificial stock market. The potential for context as a principled manner of closely integrating crisp reasoning and fuzzy learning is discussed.

The notion of context arises in assorted areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including knowledge representation, natural language processing, intelligent information retrieval, etc. Although the term ‘context’ is frequently employed in descriptions, explanations, and analyses of computer programs in these areas, its meaning is frequently left to the reader’s understanding. In other words, it is used in an intuitive manner. In an influential paper, Clark and Carlson (1981) state that context has become a favourite word. They then complain that the denotation of the word has become murkier as its uses have been extended in many directions, making context some sort of ‘conceptual garbage can.’.

This article examines the interpretive dimensions of human action. Although it takes the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, the article attempts to develop a more robust hermeneutical account of the reflexivity of social actors and those who study them than Bourdieu himself has considered. It is argued that interpretation is best understood not as the homologous expression of inculcated structures but rather as context-sensitive and reflexively context-transforming action—or what the author wishes to characterize, respectively, as first- and second-order thematizations of embeddedness. The article concludes by contrasting the author's position with the thick description of Clifford Geertz.

In traditional linguistic accounts of context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is, a situation in which an expression is uttered. Thus, features such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse are all parts of context. But context is a wider and more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. For one thing, context is a relational concept relating social actions and their surroundings, relating social actions, relating individual actors and their surroundings, and relating the set of individual actors and their social actions to their surroundings.

At the heart of natural language processing is the understanding of context dependent meanings. This paper presents a preliminary model of formal contexts based on situation theory. It also gives a worked-out example to show the use of contexts in lifting, i.e., how propositions holding in a particular context transform when they are moved to another context. This is useful in NLP applications where preserving meaning is a desideratum.