Generating Tailored, Comparative Descriptions with Contextually Appropriate Intonation

Generating responses that take user preferences into account requires adaptation at all levels of the generation process. This article describes a multi-level approach to presenting user-tailored information in spoken dialogues which brings together for the first time multi-attribute decision models, strategic content planning, surface realization that incorporates prosody prediction, and unit selection synthesis that takes the resulting prosodic structure into account. The system selects the most important options to mention and the attributes that are most relevant to choosing between them, based on the user model. Multiple options are selected when each offers a compelling trade-off. To convey these trade-offs, the system employs a novel presentation strategy which straightforwardly lends itself to the determination of information structure, as well as the contents of referring expressions. During surface realization, the prosodic structure is derived from the information structure using Combinatory Categorial Grammar in a way that allows phrase boundaries to be determined in a flexible, data-driven fashion. This approach to choosing pitch accents and edge tones is shown to yield prosodic structures with significantly higher acceptability than baseline prosody prediction models in an expert evaluation. These prosodic structures are then shown to enable perceptibly more natural synthesis using a unit selection voice that aims to produce the target tunes, in comparison to two baseline synthetic voices. An expert evaluation and f0 analysis confirm the superiority of the generator-driven intonation and its contribution to listeners' ratings

What projects and why

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implicatio

The acquisition of asserted, presupposed, and pragmatically implied exhaustivity in Hungarian

The paper reports on three experiments in which the exhaustive interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle csak ‘only’, structural focus constructions, and sentences with neutral intonation and word order were investigated. The results obtained not only reveal the developmental trajectory of the adult-like comprehension of each sentence type, but also contribute to the discussion concerning the semantic or pragmatic nature of their exhaustive meaning component. As the three construction types were judged in different ways on a three-point scale, the findings appear to support the hypothesis according to which exhaustivity is part of the asserted content of sentences with csak ‘only’, it is context-independently presupposed in the case of structural focus, and in certain contexts it can arise as an implicature in the case of neutral utterances, as well

The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics

Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises historical questions: Why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural-language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand artificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural- language semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explana- tory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adoption of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-conditional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology

MODAL SUBORDINATION, ANAPHORA, AND DISTRIBUTIVITY

The analysis of pronominal anaphora provides us with tools to explore linguistic structures involving the scope of operators. In this dissertation, I develop a theory of anaphora, modifying and extending existing proposals in the literature, and then use it to explore distributivity and related phenomena. I assume that pronouns are interpreted as variables, and base a theory of anaphora on the claim that there are two kinds of constraints on how these variables may be bound. One type of constraint involves the relative positions of antecedents and anaphors in the hierarchical structure of discourse. I propose an extension of Discourse Representation Theory wherein a relation of subordination between propositions is induced by their mood. Mood is analyzed in terms of modality, and establishes the position of a proposition in the Discourse Representation. The structure which results constrains both inference and the potential for anaphora. The other type of constraint on anaphoric binding is based on the configurational notion of c-command in the Government and Binding Theory. Recognizing that the Binding Theory and the theory of discourse anaphora are both necessary in a comprehensive theory of anaphora permits a clarification and simplification of each. It is argued that the Binding Principles hold at S-Structure, and that coindexation is only a guide to interpretation in discourse, and not necessarily an indication of coreference. This comprehensive theory of anaphora serves as a tool for the exploration of the phenomenon of distributivity, including the group/distributive ambiguity in examples such as four men lifted a piano. It is argued that distributivity arises in predication when either the determiner in the subject is quantificational or there is an implicit or explicit adverbial distributivity operator. Anaphoric phenomena associated with distributivity are shown to be a consequence of the scope of operators. This theory of distributivity, implemented in the mapping from S-Structures onto Discourse Representations, then provides further arguments that coindexation is not to be interpreted as coreference, and also illuminates the contribution of the number of a pronoun to its interpretation