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Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral ... - Arteimi.info

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18.5 Discourse <strong>and</strong> Pragmatic Analysis<br />

Syntactic <strong>and</strong> semantic analysis are essential but not sufficient to underst<strong>and</strong><br />

natural languages. The discourse <strong>and</strong> pragmatic concept [7] in which a<br />

sentence is uttered are equally useful for underst<strong>and</strong>ing the sentence. For<br />

instance, consider the following dialogs.<br />

Dialog 1: Did you read the AI book by Konar? The last chapter on robotics is<br />

interesting.<br />

Dialog 2: Mr. Sen’s house was robbed last week. They have taken all the<br />

ornaments Mrs. Sen possessed.<br />

Dialog 3: John has a red car. Jim wanted it for a picnic.<br />

In the last three examples, the first sentence asserts a fact or a query<br />

<strong>and</strong> the second sentence refers to it directly or indirectly. In example 1, ‘the<br />

last chapter’ refers to the last chapter of Konar’s book. The subject ‘they’ in<br />

the second example corresponds to the robbers. The word ‘it’ in example 3<br />

refers to John’s car. It is thus evident that to represent part or whole of entities<br />

<strong>and</strong> actions, we often refer to it by a word or phrase.<br />

Programs that can accomplish multiple sentence underst<strong>and</strong>ing rely on<br />

large knowledge bases, which is difficult to construct for individual problems.<br />

Alternatively, a set of strong constraints on the domain of discourse may be<br />

incorporated in the program, so that a more limited knowledge base is<br />

sufficient to solve the problems. To realize the pragmatic context in the<br />

programs, the following issues may be considered.<br />

a) Focussing the relevant part in the dialog: While underst<strong>and</strong>ing<br />

natural language, the program should be able to focus on the relevant<br />

parts of the knowledge base available to it. These knowledge bases may<br />

then be employed to resolve ambiguity among the different parts of the<br />

uttered message. For example, in the first noun phrase in the sentence:<br />

‘the last chapter on robotics is interesting’, the knowledge base should<br />

identify the phrase ‘the last chapter’ <strong>and</strong> determine its significance in<br />

connection with a book (see dialog 1). The ‘part-whole’ relationship<br />

thus should be stressed <strong>and</strong> the related rules are to be checked for firing.<br />

b) Modeling individual beliefs: In order to participate in a dialog the<br />

program should be efficient to model the beliefs of the individuals. The<br />

modal logic should be used to represent such beliefs. We illustrate the<br />

use of two modal operators in this regard. The first one is Believe (A,P),<br />

which is true, when A believes that the proposition P is true. The other

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