Requirements for Dialogue Context Modelling

Abstract

This paper is concerned with context in relation to language understanding, focusing on the interactive use of language in dialogues. Language understanding in general requires contextual information in order to assign appropriate meanings to linguistic expressions; the understanding of utterances in dialogue involves context in an additional, more fundamental way, in that it requires us to relate utterances to their causes and intended effects. In other words, for language used in interaction, the very notions of understanding and utterance meaning should be defined in terms of context properties and how they change through communication.