2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

work at the sentence level. This ambiguity is clearly inherent to the human language
when used out of a context.
3. The pragmatic aspect.
The module related to this aspect works on the underspecified relationships created by the
semantic module. It builds a general representation of a series of sentences - which may be
a continuous text or a dialogue. This module has to link a given sentence to the former
discourse by confronting them with the given context/setting which can be reduced to a set
of “givens” and relationships. This set of informations must allow for resolving the
aforementioned ambiguities as a consequence of the initial linguistic underspecifications
in the semantic representation.
Each of these three modules requires a specific formal language. We have chosen the
following ones for our project.
Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag, 1994) - in short HPSG - for the
syntactic module.
Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al. 1999) – in short MRS – for the semantic
module.
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides, 2003) - in short SDRT –
for the pragmatic module.
Both HPSG and MRS are already implemented in a computional language in a system called
Linguistic Knowledge Builder (Copestake et al. 2000)- in short LKB. Unfortunately, this is
not the case for SDRT . So, this tough task has to be done by our research group.
An example of communication / negotiation in a PSO setting
The text below is part of the transcript of a dialogue recorded in Leposavic (Kosovo) in Januar
2003 during a working visit in the context of our project. The two parties involved are the
Damage Control Officer (DCO) of the Belgian Battle Group in Kosovo – whose
mothertongue is French - and a Kosovar civilian, assisted by a Kosovar interpreter who
masters more or less English.
Β01 Officer : Hello Dragan.
Β02 Interpr : Sacha, Sacha ! How are you ? (Gives a document to the DCO)
Β03 Officer : I am OK.
Β04 Interpr : This is the person who had an accident with a Belgian bus six months ago.
Β05 Officer : Yes… ?
Β06 Interpr : But he did not get his money yet.
B07 Officer : Mm. Mm. (Reads the document) Vu-ko-ma…
B08 Interpr : Vukomanovic.
B09 Officer : I don’t have a file on this person.
B10 Interpr : Hun?He told me that they told him to wait four months. Within this four months
he would be refunded. But he is waiting since more than six months and a halve.
…
The syntactic module : HPSG and LKB
Figure 1 shows how LKB analyses a simple sentence like B09 “I don’t have a file on this
person.”
405
45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003