Textual Representation of Meaning

Task: Discover and document text-based systems for the representation of illocutionary forces, predicate argument structures, and semantic relations and evaluations of such systems, with an emphasis on systems designed for use by lay users as well as domain experts, and designed for application to typologically diverse languages. 1 Disclaimer There may be systems that enable authors, writing in a variety of languages, to indicate the illocutionary force of their utterances or to otherwise enhance the meaning of what they write. If such systems exist, they are well-kept secrets (at least from someone unversed in the applicable lingo); they did not make it into this survey. Instead there are basically two types of systems described here: those designed for labeling existing corpora, and those that help authors to create or clarify semantic relationships. Besides being largely irrelevant, the systems reviewed here are presented with a bare minimum of detail, reflecting an inadequate understanding of what they purport to do and how they do it. In written communication, illocutionary force must generally be inferred from the surface structure of an utterance. Whether monolingual or translingual, dialogue would become tedious if each utterance needed to be tagged as suggestion, advice, skepticism, gratitude, humor, etc. Sometimes, however, an utterance will offer one or more clues to its illocutionary force, without any conscious effort on the speaker's part. Searle (1969) called these clues " illocutionary force indicating devices ". Levinson (1983) changed " indicating " to " identifying " and gave the term a catchy acronym: IFID. Some IFIDs are sentence openers that identify the utterance as an indirect speech act, thus giving the sentence a different illocutionary force from its surface meaning. Examples include " why not " and " let me ". IFIDs and other language-specific devices are helpful when people share a language, but they may be of little use to someone who is seeing an utterance in translation. The sentence " Is that right? " , meaning basically " That's interesting " in colloquial English, may not have the intended illocutionary force when translated into another language. The average author or speaker, however, would not recognize this utterance as " Backchannel in question form " and tag it accordingly (as in the SWBD-DAMSL system described below). Instead the user would probably tag the utterance as a a simple question. Any system that allows (or requires) users to specify illocutionary or semantic …