Gothenburg Papers in Computational Linguistics Using Situations to Reason about the Interpretation of Speech Events Using Situations to Reason about the Interpretation of Speech Events Using Situations to Reason about the Interpretation of Speech Events

The EKNTOOL implementation developed in the Fra-CaS project uses the situation theoretic notion of restriction to account for background information provided by the context and also information about the utterance conceived of as an event (a kind of situation). It also uses role labels associated with abstracts to link various parts of the utterance with roles in the interpretation. In this chapter we explain how these mechanisms function to provide a Montague-like compositionality. We point to some problems that arise which are in part conceptual and in part have to do with the computation of-reduced-abstracts with restrictions. We then consider the possibility of achieving the eeect of restrictions and role labels with records and dependent record types inspired by recent work in Martin-LL of type theory. These would allow us to employ a simpler situation theory and also point to relationships with other type-theoretic approaches to grammar.