Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium (review)

This volume collects nineteen papers selected from the BI-DIALOG workshop on dialogue held at the University of Bielefeld in 2001, along with an introduction by the editors. Most of the papers are concerned with issues relating to the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, though many of the problems and solutions raised are also relevant to other contexts, such as single-author discourse and individual sentences. A wide range of approaches to dialogue is represented, but the primary focus is on semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics.

Alex Lascarides and Nicholas Asher are concerned with the interpretation of imperatives and their interaction with discourse context. Jonathan Ginzburg, Ivan Sag, and Matthew Purver provide a means of integrating conversational moves into a grammar for dialogue within the type hierarchy of an HPSG framework, within which they propose a semantics for interjections. Along somewhat similar lines, Claudia Sassen proposes an HPSG treatment of illocutionary acts based on the propositional logic for speech acts proposed in John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken’s Foundations of illocutionary logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Continuing the discussion of speech acts, Rob van der Sandt analyzes denial acts, taken to be presuppositional, within a logical system based on his DRT-based system for presupposition projection. Jennifer Spenader also discusses presupposition; she examines the literature on bridging definite descriptions and argues that linguistic context should be given a larger role in their analysis. The last paper on presupposition, by Alessandro Capone, presents a critical discussion of existing analyses of presupposition as a prologue to an analysis of Italian presuppositional clitics. Next, Etsuko Oishi uses speech-act related distinctions made by J. L. Austin to analyze generics, referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, and ‘aboutness’. Marina Terkourafi’s paper is also about pragmatic issues, analyzing politeness as stemming from particularized implicature and properties of the discourse context. William Mann’s contribution is a survey of different models of intention, focusing on attributes of intentions that have been proposed in the literature.

Jörn Kreutel and Colin Matheson’s contribution begins the computationally oriented section of the book. They consider dialogue acts in terms of update of information states. Kersten Fischer uses an experiment in human-robot communication to determine what elements of the common ground are drawn on most by speakers in communication with unfamiliar partners. Alois Knoll discusses a multimodal dialogue system for communicating with robot systems. Oliver Lemon, Anne Bracy, Alexander Gruenstein, and Stanley Peters discuss a multimodal system for interaction between humans and mobile robots that also makes use of dynamic information state models. Berne Ludwig presents a dialogue modeling system that incorporates information about participant beliefs and intentions and supports belief update of participants and inferences about discourse relations. Negotiative dialogue is the topic of Robin Cooper, Stina Ericsson, Staffan Larsson, and Ian Lewin’s contribution, which points out difficulties with earlier analyses of such dialogue and uses the Questions Under Discussion model of information states to remedy them. The implementation-oriented part of the book closes with the contribution of David Schlangen, Alex Lascarides, and Ann Copestake, which describes a component of dialogue systems that resolves underspecification in speech-act types, goals, and the denotation of temporal expressions.

The last part of the book returns to more purely theoretical concerns. Anton Benz’s paper uses a formulation of bidirectional optimality theory to model epistemic contexts and expectations, which are shown to play a role in anaphora resolution. Elena Karagjosova analyzes German modal particles as marking a speaker...