Towards A Separation of Pragmatic Knowledge and Contextual Information

In this paper we address the question of how traditional approaches to modeling world knowledge, i.e. to model shared conceptualizations of specific domains of interest via formal ontologies, can be enhanced by a pragmatic layer to solve the problem of explicating hitherto implicit information contained in the user’s utterances and to further the assistance capabilities of dialog systems and how they can be connected to dedicated analyzers that observe topical contextual information. For this purpose, the notions of context and pragmatics are introduced as one of the central problems facing applications in artificial intelligence. We will argue that pragmatic inferences are impossible without contextual observations and introduce a model of context-adaptive processing using a combination of formal ontologies and analyzers for various types of context.