Human social cognition relies on an ability to predict what others will think, feel or do in novel situations. Research in social neuroscience has consistently observed several brain regions that contribute ubiquitously to these abilities, including medial prefrontal cortex and aspects of lateral and medial parietal cortex. Interestingly, parallel work has suggested that this same network of re...

I am deeply honored to receive the ACL’s Lifetime Achievement Award. I’m especially honored when I look back at the list of previous winners—Chuck Fillmore, Eugene Charniak, Eva Hajičová, Fred Jelinek, Martin Kay, Aravind Joshi, and the others— they’re all my heroes. I was of course delighted to learn of this award. The most we can hope for in life is to take part in the conversation, and an aw...

In several papers Budzynska and Reed have argued that inferences should be ‘anchored’ to relations between utterances rather than to utterances themselves; then, by appeal to what they call ‘dialogue glue’, these relations are somehow reified as ‘implicit’ speech-acts. In this paper I will argue that this is a mistake caused by confusion over different ways an illocution can be relational and t...

Text understanding in a spatial domain is often seen as the construction of a mental model. In this paper we present the rst prototype of a program that realizes some of the characteristics claimed for spatial reasoning processes in mental models. Our work is based on homogeneous coordinate systems and transformation matrices. This means that a relation between two objects A and B is represente...