Content Recognition in Dialogue

Deciding what is the content of an utterance in dialogue is a potentially tricky business: should it be an entity computed using (solely/primarily) grammatical information or is it determined by recognition of participant intention using domain level inference? The decisions one makes on this score play a crucial role in any model of the interaction involved in grounding an utterance. Integrating the clarificatory potential of an utterance into the grounding process transforms the issue of content recognition into a more concrete issue: grammatically determined content has markedly distinct clarificatory potential from content determined using domain level inference. This leads to a new challenge: how to integrate the two types of content in such a way that both enables their distinct clarificatory potential to be maintained and allows content determined by domain level inference to feature in grounding. My talk will address this challenge.