Language Use in Context

ny text or dialogue establishes a linguistic context within which subsequent utterances must be understood. And beyond the linguistic context is the participatory context. A speaker or writer directs an utterance or text toward a hearer or reader with a particular purpose—-to inform, to amuse, to collaborate in a task, perhaps. The form and content of the utterance are chosen accordingly, and the listener or reader must infer the underlying intent as part of their understanding. This article explores recent research on language use in context, going beyond sentence boundaries and processing discourse—treating texts or dialogues as whole units composed of interrelated parts, not merely as sequences of isolated sentences. The article discusses the comprehension and production of language , looking at both texts and dialogues. A text to be processed might be, for example, a newspaper or magazine article being translated into another language or whose content is to be " understood " or abstracted in an information storage and retrieval system. A dialogue to be processed might be a conversation , spoken or typed, between a human and a computer, in service of some collaborative task. Many of the problems described here occur in both kinds of discourse. We use the words " speaker " and " writer, " as well as " hearer " and " reader, " almost interchangeably. The underlying goal of the research described in this special section is to move beyond " toy " systems Context Because using language involves so much more than creating and comprehending isolated utterances, computers, like people, must accommodate linguistic and interpersonal context if they are to use language in a natural way.