Précis for Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence

This précis outlines some of the key themes in Context and Coherence. At the core of Context and Coherence is the meta-semantic question: what determines the meaning of context-sensitive language and how do we interpret it as effortlessly as we do? What we can express with language is obviously constrained by grammar, but it also seems to depend on various non-linguistic features of an utterance situation, for example, pointing gestures. Accordingly, it is nearly universally assumed that grammar underspecifi es content: the interpretation of context-sensitive language depends in part on extra-linguistic features of the utterance situation. Contra this dominant tradition, the book develops and defends a thoroughly linguistic account: context-sensitivity resolution is entirely a matter of grammar, which is much more subtle and pervasive than has typically been noticed. In interpreting context-sensitive language as effortlessly as we do, we draw on our knowledge of these subtle, but pervasive, linguistic cues—what I call discourse conventions. If this is right, the dominant, extra-linguistic account must be rejected. It not only mischaracterizes the linguistic conventions affecting context-sensitivity resolution, but its widespread, and often implicit, endorsement leads to philosophically radical conclusions. The recent arguments for non-truth-conditional and non-classical semantics for modal discourse provide just one illustration of this point. But appeals to context are quite common within a wide range of debates across different subfi elds of philosophy, and they typically assume the extra-linguistic model of context-sensitivity resolution. If the account of context-sensitivity developed in Context and Coherence is on the right track, such arguments have to be reconsidered

Quantifying the Plausibility of Context Reliance in Neural Machine Translation

Establishing whether language models can use contextual information in a human-plausible way is important to ensure their safe adoption in real-world settings. However, the questions of when and which parts of the context affect model generations are typically tackled separately, and current plausibility evaluations are practically limited to a handful of artificial benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe), an end-to-end interpretability framework designed to quantify context usage in language models' generations. Our approach leverages model internals to (i) contrastively identify context-sensitive target tokens in generated texts and (ii) link them to contextual cues justifying their prediction. We use PECoRe to quantify the plausibility of context-aware machine translation models, comparing model rationales with human annotations across several discourse-level phenomena. Finally, we apply our method to unannotated generations to identify context-mediated predictions and highlight instances of (im)plausible context usage in model translations

CHR Grammars

A grammar formalism based upon CHR is proposed analogously to the way Definite Clause Grammars are defined and implemented on top of Prolog. These grammars execute as robust bottom-up parsers with an inherent treatment of ambiguity and a high flexibility to model various linguistic phenomena. The formalism extends previous logic programming based grammars with a form of context-sensitive rules and the possibility to include extra-grammatical hypotheses in both head and body of grammar rules. Among the applications are straightforward implementations of Assumption Grammars and abduction under integrity constraints for language analysis. CHR grammars appear as a powerful tool for specification and implementation of language processors and may be proposed as a new standard for bottom-up grammars in logic programming. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), 2005Comment: 36 pp. To appear in TPLP, 200

Evaluational adjectives

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions

Speakers use their own discourse model to determine referents' accessibility during the production of referring expressions.

We report two experiments that investigated the widely-held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions, by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (relative to definite NPs) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, but whether their addressee heard that the referent was mentioned had no effect, indicating that speakers use their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced fewer pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned a referential competitor than when it mentioned the referent, but this effect did not differ depending on whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee's

INDONESIAN JURASSIC PARK’S KOMODO NATIONAL PARK PROJECT CONTROVERSY (A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TEMPO.CO’S ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS)

This paper explains (1) macrostructure, (2) microstructure, (3) social cognition, and (4) social context in the news discourse on the rejection of the Komodo National Park Jurassic Park Project in Labuan Bajo. His presentation is expected to be a means of education about the media's partiality towards reporting on environmental issues, especially about Komodo dragons and their supporting ecosystems. Research data in the form of news discourse were studied based on the critical discourse analysis procedure of Teun A. Van Dijk's model. Macrostructure analysis shows that Tempo.co tend to dare to raise popular issues that are sensitive to the government, especially about the rejection of the Komodo National Park Jurassic Park Project in Labuan Bajo as a topic of discourse. Analysis of the superstructure shows that in delivering news about the rejection of citizens, Tempo.co so straightforwardly highlight the negative side of the news. Tempo.co also displays the comments of the characters or sources as a whole. Microstructure analysis yields several conclusions regarding meaning, word selection, sentence usage, and rhetoric displayed in the Tempo.co. The language used by journalists in voicing their views on the rejection of the Komodo National Park Jurassic Park Project in Labuan Bajo is straightforward and wordless. Journalists conveyed their intentions and details explicitly, and even journalists deliberately quoted and used the word "illegitimate" to indicate that exploitation and extraction were forbidden acts. This further confirms the position of Tempo.co in favor of environmental issues even though the risks must be contrary to government policies. Analysis of social cognition shows that this news text does not support government discourse. Analysis of the social context shows that residents' rejection of the Komodo National Park Jurassic Park project in Labuan Bajo is based on community anxiety about the threat of extinction of Komodo dragons endemic animals on Flores Island