Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Questions in Dialogue

  • Published:
Linguistics and Philosophy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper we explore how compositional semantics, discourse structure, and the cognitive states of participants all contribute to pragmatic constraints on answers to questions in dialogue. We synthesise formal semantic theories on questions and answers with techniques for discourse interpretation familiar from computational linguistics, and show how this provides richer constraints on responses in dialogue than either component can achieve alone.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Asher, N.: 1986, 'Belief in Discourse Representation Theory', Journal of Philosophical Logic 15, 127–189.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Asher, N.: 1987, 'A Typology for Attitude Verbs', Linguistics and Philosophy 10, 125–197.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asher, N.: 1993, Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asher, N.: 1996, 'Mathematical Treatments of Discourse Contexts', in P. Dekker and M. Stokhot (eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth Amsterdam Colloquium in Formal Semantics, ILLC Publications, University of Amsterdam, pp 21–40.

  • Asher, N. and R. Koons: 1993, 'The Revision of Beliefs and Intentions in a Changing World', in Proceedings of the AAI Spring Symposium Series: Reasoning about Mental States: Formal Theories and Applications.

  • Asher, N. and A. Lascarides: 1994, 'Intentions and Information in Discourse', in Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL94), Las Cruces, pp. 35–41.

  • Asher, N. and A. Lascarides: 1995, 'Lexical Disambiguation in a Discourse Context', Journal of Semantics 12, 69–108.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asher, N. and P. Sablayrolles: 1995, 'A Typology and Discourse Semantics for Motion Verbs and Spatial PPs in French', Journal of Semantics 12(2), 163–210.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belnap, N. D. Jr.: 1985, 'Questions and Answers in Montague Grammar', in S. Peters and E. Saarinen (eds.), Processes, Beliefs, and Questions, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 165–198.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, M.: 1979, Questions in Montague Grammar, Indiana University Linguistics Club.

  • Bromberger, S.: 1962, 'An Approach to Explanation', in R. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy, Oxford University Press, pp. 72–105.

  • Cohen, P. and H. Levesque: 1990, 'Rational Interaction as the Basis for Communication', in P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. E. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, Bradford/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 221–255.

    Google Scholar 

  • Copestake, A.: 1992, The Representation of Lexical Semantic Information, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, Cognitive Science Research Paper CSRP-280.

  • Dalrymple, M., M. Kanazawa, Y. Kim, S. Mchombo, and S. Peters: 1998, 'Reciprocal Expressions and the Concept of Reciprocity', Linguistics and Philosophy 21, 159–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dwork, C. and Y. Moses: 1986, 'Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Byzantine Environment I: Crash Failures', in J. Halpern (ed.), Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986 Conference, pp. 149–169.

  • Fernando, T.: 1994, 'What is a DRS?', in R. Cooper and J. Groonendijk (eds.), Integrating Semantic Theories II, Dyana Deliverable R2.1.B, 1994, also appeared in the Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilhurg, 1994.

  • Ginzburg, J.: 1993, 'Resolving Questions, Technical report HCRC/RP-46', Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh.

  • Ginzburg, J.: 1995, 'Resolving Questions Part I', Linguistics and Philosophy 18(5), 459–527.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ginzburg, J.: 1995, 'Resolving Questions Part II', Linguistics and Philosophy 18(6), 567–609.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, N. and S. Carberry: 1994, 'A Hybrid Reasoning Model for Indirect Answers', Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 58–65.

  • Groenendijk, J. and M. Stokhof: 1982, 'Semantic Analysis of wh-Complements', Linguistics and Philosophy 5.

  • Groenendijk, J. and M. Stokhof: 1984, Studies on the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of Answers, Ph.D. thesis, Centrale Interfaculteit, Amsterdam.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, B. and S. Kraus: 1993, 'Collaborative Plans for Group Activities', in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference in Artificial Intelligence (IJCA193), Chambery, France, August 1993, pp. 367–373.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, B. and C. Sidner: 1986, 'Attention, Intentions and the Structure of Discourse', Computational Linguistics 12, 175–204.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, B. and C. Sidner: 1990, 'Plans for Discourse', in Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan and Martha A. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, pp. 417–444.

  • Halpern, J. and Y. Moses: 1984, 'Towards a Theory of Knowledge and Ignorance: Preliminary Report', in Proceedings of the Non-Monotonic Reasoning Workshop, AAAI Fall Symposium, October 1984, pp. 125–143.

  • Hobbs, J.: 1985, 'On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse', Report No. CSLI-85-37, Center for the Study of Language and Information, October, 1985.

  • Hobbs, J., M. Stickel, D. Appelt, and P. Martin: 1993, 'Interpretation as Abduction', Artificial Intelligence 63(1–2), 69–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hovy, E. H.: 1988, 'Planning Coherent Multisentence Text', in Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL88), pp. 163–169.

  • Kamp, H.: 1990, 'Propositional Attitudes', in C. A. Anderson and J. Owens (eds.), The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind, CSLI Lecture Notes 20, University of Chicago Press, pp. 27–90.

  • Kamp, H. and U. Reyle: 1993, From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karttunen, L.: 1977, 'Syntax and Semantics of Questions', Linguistics and Philosophy 1.

  • Lascarides, A. and N. Asher: 1993, 'Temporal Interpretation, Discourse Relations and Commonsense Entailment', Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 437–493.

    Google Scholar 

  • Litman, D. and J. Allen: 1990, 'Discourse Processing and Commonsense Plans', in Philip R. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. A. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, pp. 365–388.

  • Lochboum, K.: 1993, 'A Collaborative Planning Approach to Discourse Understanding', Technical Report TR-20-93, Center for Research in Computing Technology, Harvard University.

  • Lochbaum, K.: 1995, 'The Use of Knowledge Preconditions in Language Processing', in Proceedings for the 14th Joint International Conference in Artificial Intelligence (IJCA195), Montreal, August 1995.

  • Mann, W. C. and S. Thompson: 1986, 'Rhetorical Structure Theory: Description and Construction of Text', ISI Technical Report Number RS-86-174.

  • Moore, J. and C. Paris: 1993, 'Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing Intentional and Rhetorical Information', Computational Linguistics 19(4), 651–694.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore, J. and M. Pollack: 1992, 'A Problem for RST: The Need for Multi Level Discourse Analysis', Computational Linguistics 18(4), 537–544.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perrault, R.: 1990, 'An Application of Default Logic to Speech Act Theory', in P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. A. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, pp. 161–186.

  • Polanyi, L.: 1985, 'A Theory of Discourse Structure and Discourse Coherence', in Papers from the Ceneral Session at the Twenty-First Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, pp. 25–27.

  • Pollack, M.: 1986, Inferring Domain Plans in Question-Answering, Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pollack, M.: 1990, 'Plans as Complex Mental Attitudes', in P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. A. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, pp. 77–104.

  • Sandt, S. van der: 1992, 'Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution', Journal of Semantics 9, 133–377.

    Google Scholar 

  • Searle, J.: 1969, Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Singh, M. and N. Asher: 1993, 'A Logic of Intentions and Beliefs', Journal of Philosophical Logic 22, 513–544.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stalnaker, R.: 1978, 'Assertion', in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics volume 9: Pragmatics, Academic Press.

  • Webber, B. B.: 1991, 'Structure and Ostension in the Interpretation of Discourse Deixis', Language and Cognitive Processes 6(2), 107–135.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, USA, e-mail

    Nicholas Asher

  2. Centre for Cognitive Science and HCRC, University of Edinburgh, 2, Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, Scotland, e-mail

    Alex Lascarides

Authors
  1. Nicholas Asher
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alex Lascarides
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Asher, N., Lascarides, A. Questions in Dialogue. Linguistics and Philosophy 21, 237–309 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005364332007

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005364332007

Keywords

Search

Navigation