Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 8, numbers 1 and 2, 2015 // View article
Authors:
Gábor Alberti
László Nőthig
Keywords: dynamic discourse semantics; possible worlds; truth-conditional interpretation; speech acts; presupposition
Abstract:
Our software application eALIS2.1 (just like eALIS1.1) is primarily intended to supply linguists with a highly intelligent device to build frag¬ments of languages. On the basis of the fragments, (non-linguist) experts can elaborate a peculiarly “multiplied” database that offers, besides the model of the external world, hundreds of its (appropriately labeled) alternatives. According to the eALIS theoretical framework that we use (eALIS: Reciprocal and Lifelong Interpretation System), these alternative models can all be linked to simulated human agents (addressers and addressees of possible dis-courses), who are represented in the world model as conglomerates of their pieces of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions. Finally, (further) users can select lexical items to build sentences, the truth-conditional interpretation of which the program can calculate on the basis of the actual version of the above-sketched “multiplied world model”. It performs this after checking whether the given sentences can serve as felicitous expositive speech acts in realistic on-going discourses. Our software application serves not only the theoretical purpose of testing eALIS as a Discourse-Representation-Theory-based “pragma¬linguistics” approach (by implementing it), but it also serves the practical purpose of collecting and systematizing data in the peculiar structure that eALIS offers. It is a crucial feature of eALIS that it is intended to truly capture human intelligence (more precisely, such sapiens-specific components of long-term memory as episodic memory, with its space-time coordinates, and semantic memory, containing context-free knowledge).
Pages: 85 to 106
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2015. Used with permission.
Publication date: June 30, 2015
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2679