Temporal Contexts for Discourse Representation: An Extension of the Conceptual Graph Approach

Abstract

A discourse is composed of a sequence of sentences that must be interpreted with respect to the context in which they are uttered and to the actions that produce them: locutors‘ speech acts. The analysis of discourse content must be based on a pragmatic approach to the study of language in use. Some of the most obvious linguistic elements that require contextual information for their representation are deictic forms such as here, now, I, you, this , and verb tenses. Several authors have recognized a need for introducing contextual structures in knowledge representation models such as semantic networks. Sowa‘s Conceptual Graph Theory is a powerful approach to conceptually represent knowledge contained in discourses. However, it must be extended in order to represent several semantic and pragmatic mechanisms related to the expression of time in natural language. In this paper we present such an extension as a framework for modeling temporal knowledge in discourses integrating several features borrowed from speech act theory. First, we introduce the notions of time interval, temporal object, temporal situation, and temporal relation. Then, we discuss the importance of explicitly introducing the concept of time coordinate system in a discourse representation and we present different kinds of temporal contexts: narrator‘s perspective, agent‘s perspective and temporal localization. We show how this conceptual framework can be used to represent various referential mechanisms in discourse such as anaphoras, indexicals, direct and indirect styles. We also discuss how to model several linguistic phenomena such as speech act characteristics and the specification of performative and attitude utterances. Finally, we briefly discuss how verb tenses can be determined in a discourse on the basis of this temporal approach.