题目：The Dynamics of Conversation

演讲人：Ruth Kempson 教授，伦敦大学国王学院（King’s College London）

主持人：李文山 博士，清华大学人文社会科学学院中文系

工作语言：英语

地点：清华大学新斋304会议室

时间：2011年10月14日（周五） 下午4：00

主办：清华大学中文系

内容简介：In conversation, we interactively build up structures together, with free switching of speaker/hearer roles both within and across sentence boundaries. Current grammars provide a poor basis from which to explain this phenomenon, or to explain the way in which all language understanding is relative to context. In this talk I address this challenge. I introduce a grammar formalism (Dynamic Syntax) in which incremental information-growth following the dynamics of processing forms the core structural notion. I will report recent work showing how from this perspective, we gain richly structured and evolving concepts of context and content, and immediate explanation of the patterns of ellipsis displayed in conversational dialogue (for which there is direct computational implementation). In closing I explore the significance of these results for language modelling.