Abstract

This chapter presents a characterisation of the field of computational pragmatics, discusses some of the fundamental issues in the field, and provides a survey of recent developments. Central to computational pragmatics is the development and use of computational tools and models for studying the relations between utterances and their context of use. Essential for understanding these relations are the use of inference and the description of language use as actions inspired by the context, and intended to influence the context. The chapter therefore focuses on recent work in the use of inference for utterance interpretation and in dialogue modeling in terms of dialogue acts, viewed as context-changing actions. The chapter concludes with a survey of recent activities concerning the construction and use of resources in computational pragmatics, in particular annotation schemes, annotated corpora, and tools for corpus construction and use.