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 ...

In this qualitative study the college experience of an individual with Down syndrome was examined. The student audited two academic courses and participated in various nonacademic campus activities. The investigation yielded multiple themes within the following areas of importance: (a) the meaning of going to college, (b) the development and meaning of college friendships, (c) negotiation of th...

In collaborative ontology engineering, contexts are key to manage the complexity of different dependency types between ontological artefacts. Instead of being frustrated by out-of-control evolution processes, proper context dependency management will allow human experts to focus on the meaning interpretation and negotiation processes. This requires support for the detection and resolution of me...

DOGMA-MESS (Meaning Evolution Support System) is a system and methodology for supporting scalable, community-grounded ontology engineering. It uses a socio-technical process of meaning negotiation to tackle the scalability problems in ontology engineering. In order to improve the effectiveness of DOGMA-MESS, we adopt Semantic Decision Tables (SDT). An SDT contains semantically rich decision rul...

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...