DISCOURSE AND PRAGMATIC PROCESSING

Discourse means written or spoken communication or a formal discussion of

debate
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which
context contributes to meaning
• To recognize relationships among sentences, a great deal of knowledge
about the world is required.
• Some examples of relationships between phrases and parts of discourse
contexts
• Identical entities :
- Bill had red balloon
- John wanted it red balloon
• Parts of entities
Sue opened the book she just bought
The title page was torn (refers to the page of the book)
• Parts of action :
- John went on a business trip to New York
- He left on an early morning flight
Taking a flight refers to the action of going on a trip
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DISCOURSE AND PRAGMATIC PROCESSING (Contd..)

• Names of individuals :
- Dave went to the movie person’s name

• Casual chains :
- There was big snow storm yesterday
- The schools were closed today
snow storm was the reason for closing of schools.

Planning Sequence :
– Salley wanted a new car. Getting a job due to desire for
a
She decided to get a job. new car

Illocutionary force : It sure is cold in here

intended effect may be expecting to close the window or turn up
the thermostat. 2
DISCOURSE AND PRAGMATIC PROCESSING (Contd..)

• Implicit Presumptions
- Did joe clear CSIO1
Presuppositions Include
• – CSIO1 is a valid course
- John is a student
- John took the course
• Programs to understand such contexts require
large knowledge bases or strong constraints on
the domain of discourse to limit the KB.
• The way the knowledge is organized is critical to
the success of the understanding program.
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 Kinds of knowledge in discourse and
pragramatic Processing
• Four kinds of knowledge can be identified
1. The current focus of the dialogue or using
focus in understanding.
2. A model of each participant’s current beliefs or
modeling beliefs
3. The goal driven character of dialogue or using
goals and plans for understanding
4. The rules of conversation shared by all
participants or conversational postulates
• The goal is to reason about objects, events,
goals, beliefs, plans and likelihoods into NLU.
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1. Using Focus in understanding
There are two tasks :
• Focus on the relevant parts of the KB.
• Use that knowledge to make connections among things
that were said.
Some mechanisms for focusing.
• Using appropriate scripts such as hotel script.
• By giving highly simplified instruction
- To make the cake, combine all ingredients pour them
into the pan, and bake for 30 mns.
• Use phrases (explicitly) such as “on the other hand” to
return to an earlier topic or “a second issue is” to
denote the continuation of a topic.

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How to use the focused knowledge ?

• Any object in a KB relates somehow to

almost to any other. Some highly
important relations include physical-part-
of, temporal part-of, and element of.
Consider “sue opened the book she just
bought”
“The title page was torn”
In this physical-part-of relates the title
page to the book that is in focus.
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 2. MODELLING BELIEFS
There are two types of beliefs :
- Shared beliefs and
- Individual beliefs.
Modelling Shared Beliefs :
- Shared beliefs are represented as facts and are
accessed whenever knowledge about any one’s
beliefs is needed.
• Scripts record commonly occurring sequences of
events.
There are two steps in using scripts :
- Select the appropriate script (s) from memory.
- Use the script (s) to fill in unspecified parts of the text
to be understood.
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 MODELLING INDIVUDUAL
BELIEFS
• Modal logic is used to model beliefs.
• Classical logic deals with the truth or false hood
of different statements as they are.
• Modal logic is concerned with the different
modes in which a statement may be true.
• Modal logics allow to talk about the truth or false
hood of a set of propositions not only in the
current state of the real world, but also in the
past or the future (temporal logics) and about
their truth or falsehood under circumstances that
might have been, but were not (conditional
logics).
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 MODELLING INDIVUDUAL
BELIEFS (Contd..)
• Modal logics allow us to talk of the truth or
falsehood of statements concerning the beliefs,
knowledge, desires, intentions and obligations of
people and robots which may respectively be
false, unjustified, un-satisfiable, irrational or
mutually contradictory.
• Modal logics are useful in NLU involving mental
states of people, other times and circumstances.
• Some model operators : Believe, know, know-
what, believe (A, P) is true whenever A believes
P to be true. (P may be believed by someone
else to be false or even if P is false).
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 MODELLING INDIVUDUAL
BELIEFS (Contd..)
• Believe ( A, P) A P  know (A, P)
• Know – what (A, P) is true if A knows the
value of the function P.
e.g. A knows the value of his age.
• Semantic nets (partitioned) can also be
used to represent individual beliefs.

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MODELLING INDIVUDUAL
BELIEFS (Contd..)
Hit S1
instance Mary

agent
ACT
dative

Bill

S3
agent
Sue
S2

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 MODELLING INDIVUDUAL
BELIEFS (Contd..)
There are three different belief spaces.
• S1 believes that Mary hit Bill.
• S2 believes that Sue hit Bill.
• S3 believes that someone hit Bill.
• Who hit Bill a can be answered using S1
or S2 or S3.
• Indirect object of the verb hit is Bill (Dative
case).
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 3. USING GOALS AND PLANS
FOR UNDERSTANDING
• Consider
“John was anxious to get his daughter’s new
bike put together before Christmas Eve. He
looked high and low (to search every where)
for a screw driver”.
We need to recognize that, John had
1. A goal (getting the bike put together)
2. A plan (putting together subparts) and a sub-
plan (using a screw driver to screw two parts
together).

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 USING GOALS AND PLANS FOR
UNDERSTANDING (Contd..)
Some of the Common goals are :
• Satisfaction goals (sleep, food, water).
• Enjoyment foals (entertainment, competition).
• Achievement goals (possession, power, states).
• Preservation goals (health, and possessions).
• Pleasing goals (involves satisfying some other
kind of good for someone else).
• Instrumental goals, which enable preconditions
for other higher-level goals.
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USING GOALS AND PLANS FOR
UNDERSTANDING (Contd..)
• To achieve goals, plans are required. To solve
NLU problems such as understanding text, a KB
of operators, and stored plans to accomplish
common goals are used.
• KB of operators and plans enable coherent
(easy) representation of text even when steps
are missing.
• Some of the operators to understand the
example are use (A, P, G) : Use (by A of P to
performs G).

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USING GOALS AND PLANS FOR
UNDERSTANDING (Contd..)
Precondition : know-what (A, location (p))
Near (A, P)
Has-control-of (A, P)
Ready (P)
Post condition : Done (G)
To find the location of the screw driver, we need.
Look-for (A, P) :
Precondition : Can-recognise (A, P)
Post condition : Know-what (A, location (P)).
A NLU program can connect the goal of putting together
the bike with the sub-goal of searching for a screw-
driver.

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USING GOALS AND PLANS FOR
UNDERSTANDING (Contd..)
SPEECH ACTS
• The element of communication plan are
speech acts.
e.g. John could have achieved his goal
(of locating a screw driver by asking
someone where it was rather than by
booking for it.

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 4. Conversational Postulates (CP)

“Do you know what time it is “

“It sure is cold in here”
Conversational Postulates (CP) are rules about
conversation that are shared by all
speakers. Some of the postulates are
sincerity conditions.

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 Conversational Postulates
(Contd..)
Sincerity Conditions :
For a request by A of B to do R to be sincere
A must want B to do R.
A must assume B can do R.
A must assume B is willing to do R.
A must believe that B would not have done R
any why.
e.g.
A : can you open the door ?

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 Conversational Postulates
Contd..)
• Reasonableness conditions – for a request
by A of B to do R to be reasonable.
• A must have a reason for wanting R done.
• A must have a reason for assuming that B
can do R.
• A must have a reason for assuming that B
is willing to do R.
• A must have a reason for assuming that B
was not already planning to do R.
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 Conversational Postulates
Contd..)
A : can you open the door ?
B : why do you want it open ?
• Appropriateness conditions – For a statement to be
appropriate.
• It must provide the correct amount of information.
• It must accurately reflect the speaker’s beliefs.
• It must be concise and un-ambiguous.
• It must be polite.
A: who won the race ?
B: someone with long, dark hair.
C: I thought you knew all the runners.
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 Conversational Postulates
Contd..)
A inferred from B’s incomplete response that.
B did not know who won the race, because if.
B had known she would have provided a name.
• Some times people cop out (escape) of these
conversations.
A : who is going to be nominated for the position ?
B : I am sorry. I cannot answer that question.
• In such cases postulates cannot facilitate
communication.
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 Conversational Postulates
Contd..)
• Sincerity conditions can be written in
clausal form as below.
Request (A,B,R)
Want (A, Perform (B, R))
Believe (A, Can-Perform (B, R))
Believe (A, Willing-to-perform (B,R))
Believe (A,  will (Perform (B,R)).

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