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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/L51591/01
Title: PRAGMATICS: REASONING ABOUT THE SPEAKER'S ATTITUDES
Principal Investigator: Ramsay, Professor A
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Department: Language Engineering
Organisation: UMIST
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 October 1997 Ends: 30 June 2000 Value (£): 139,912
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
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Summary on Grant Application Form
The current proposal addresses the gap between representing the literal content of an utterance and finding out what its (intended and unintended) consequences are in the situation where it was uttered - the gap, to use a handy but ill-defined shorthand, between semantics and pragmatics. The general aim of this research is to follow recent trends in semantics which provide as many hooks as possible into the context, for purposes such as disambiguation and anchoring; and to support this with an effective inference engine. I am therefore arguing for making the semantic analysis more detailed and precise and for using this as the basis for general inference about what the discourse participants know and believe; and against using a collection of 'speech acts' which mediate between the semantic representation and the speaker's intentions. The work will extend existing treatments of various discourse phenomena and an existing theorem prover for property theory.
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