Lascarides, A. and Asher, N. [1999] Cognitive States, Discourse Structure and the Content of Dialogue, in Proceedings to Amstelogue 1999, Amstelogue, March 1999.
In this paper, we focus on two puzzles concerning anaphora in dialogue. On the basis of these puzzles we argue for three criteria for solving them: the representation of dialogue content must include rhetorical relations since they impose different constraints on the antecedents to anaphora; for discourse interpretation to be computable, it must be highly modular, for example the logic for discourse update and the logic for cognitive modelling must be separate; but these different modules must be allowed to interact in complex ways. We specify an account which meets these three criteria within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT: Asher, 1993). We illustrate our approach by first using principles or rationality and cooperativity to derive principles for computing discourse content---in particular, the rhetorical connections between the propositions. We then exploit these cognitively-motivated but discourse-level axioms to account for the puzzles concerning anaphora.
@inproceedings{lascarides:asher:1999,
author = {Alex Lascarides and Nicholas Asher},
year = {1999},
title = {Cognitive States, Discourse Structure and the Content of
Dialogue},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on the
Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
(Amstelogue 1999)},
pages = {1--12},
address = {Amsterdam}
}