1987 Reports

Links Between Situation and Language Use: Towards a More Coherent Interaction

Elhadad, Michael

This paper is a survey of the techniques used to take into account the influence of situation in Natural Language (NL) systems. A model of the influence of situation on language use will provide a coherent interaction between a program and its users. We propose a classification in three types of the characteristics of situation according to the way they affect language use: linguistic, semantic and pragmatic, and we study the different techniques developed for each of them. We also contrast these techniques to linguistic theories dealing with the issue.