Participants in a discourse sometimes fail to understand one another, but, when aware of the problem, collaborate upon or negotiate the meaning of a problematic utterance. To address nonunderstanding, we have developed two plan-based models of collaboration in identifying the correct referent of a description: one covers situations where both conversants know of the referent, and the other cove...

Participants in a discourse sometimes fail to understand one another, but, when aware of the problem, collaborate upon or negotiate the meaning of a problematic utterance. To address nonunderstanding, we have developed two plan-based models of collaboration in identifying the correct referent of a description: one covers situations where both conversants know of the referent, and the other cove...

The Semantic Web is a significant improvement of the original World Wide Web. It models shared meanings with ontologies, and uses these to provide many different kinds of web services. However, shared meaning is not enough. If the Semantic Web is to have an impact in the real world, with its multiple, changing, and imperfect sources of meaning, adequately modeling context is essential. Context ...

Speakers routinely provide cues in their utterances about their intended meaning that a listener must retrieve using inferential processes that go beyond pure lexical semantics and semantic composition. A classic example of this speaker-hearer meaning negotiation comes from conversational implicatures (Grice 1975). To take two well-known cases, if a speaker delivers the utterance in (1a) with t...

for a long time, culture has been an influencing parameter in negotiations. growth of international trades and business competitions has increased the importance of negotiations among countries and different cultures. developing new technologies, particularly the use of artificial intelligence in electronic trading areas, has provided us with the application of intelligent agents to resolve cha...

Digital tools are increasingly being used to support teaching in higher education. These tools place new demands on the tasks and responsibilities of the teacher, and can influence teacher roles. In this study we investigate the long-term use and development of a tool for facilitating the negotiation of meaning in argumentative student texts, through teacher and peer feedback. From this setting...

The issue of intended meaning is an open problem in the study of linguistic processes. The paper presents a notion of intended meaning based on the idea of speaker’s preference for a state of affairs to which a sentence refers. Its argument has two components. The first is the conception of meaning developed by analytic philosophy of language; that is, the meaning of a sentence depends on the t...