Language, Cognition, and Computation Lecture Series WHAT: Matthew Stone (Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Rutgers): "Interpreting Vague Utterances in Context" WHEN: Friday, May 7, 2004, 2:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) HOSTED BY: Deb Roy AT&T Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Cognitive Machines group SUMMARY: We use the interpretation of vague scalar predicates like "small" as an illustration of the ability of systematic semantic models of dialogue context to derive useful, fine-grained utterance interpretations from radically underspecified semantic forms. Our account involves two principles. We model pragmatic reasoning as a general process that infers consistent, collaborative intentions to explain agents' contributions to joint activity. We interpret vague predicates by recovering salient scales and relevant distinctions along them from the dialogue context. Given this framework, we can infer implicit standards of comparison for vague scalar predicates through completely general pragmatics, yet closely constrain the intended meaning to within a natural range. Our account connects closely with dynamic models from formal semantics, but we have implemented it exactly in a natural language interface for describing spatial actions. (The talk presents joint work with David DeVault, Rutgers.) BIO: Matthew Stone is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania, working under Mark Steedman in the Computational Linguistics Lab and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. His research centers around computational cognitive models of natural language meaning, and aims to characterize how meaning in conversation originates in and depends on interlocutors' collaborative real-world action. His work therefore bridges computational logic, theories of agency and intention from artificial intelligence and philosophy, computational models of embodied action, and approaches to discourse context and semantic representation from formal and computational linguistics. Recently, he has served on the Program Committee for IJCAI 2003, as the Tutorial Forum Chair of AAAI 2004, and program co-chair for TAG+ 2004, the Seventh International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index