A survey on pragmatic processing techniques

Abstract

Pragmatics, situated in the domains of linguistics and computational linguistics, explores the influence of context on language interpretation, extending beyond the literal meaning of expressions. It constitutes a fundamental element for natural language understanding in machine intelligence. With the advancement of large language models, the research focus in natural language processing has predominantly shifted toward high-level task processing, inadvertently downplaying the importance of foundational pragmatic processing tasks. Nevertheless, pragmatics serves as a crucial medium for unraveling human language cognition. The exploration of pragmatic processing stands as a pivotal facet in realizing linguistic intelligence. This survey encompasses important pragmatic processing techniques for subjective and emotive tasks, such as personality recognition, sarcasm detection, metaphor understanding, aspect extraction, and sentiment polarity detection. It spans theoretical research, the forefront of pragmatic processing techniques, and downstream applications, aiming to highlight the significance of these low-level tasks in advancing natural language understanding and linguistic intelligence.