What discourse features aren't needed in on-line dialogue (original) (raw)

It is very interesting as a social observer to track the development of computer scientists involved in AI and natural language-related research in theoretical issues of mutual concern to computer science and the social study of language use. The necessity of writing programs that demonstrate the validity or invalidity of conceptualizations and assumptions has caused computer scientists to cover a lot of theoretical ground in a very short time, or at least to arrive at a problem area, and to see the problem fairly clearly, that is very contemporary in social theory. There is in fact a discrepancy between the level of sophistication exhibited in locating the problem area (forced by the specific constraints of programming work) and in the theorizations concocted to solve the problem. Thus we find computer scientists and students of language use from several disciplines converging in their interest in the mechanics and metaphysics of social interaction and specifically its linguistic realization. Attempts to write natural language programs delivered the realization that even so basic a feature as nominal reference is no simple thing. In order to give an "understander" the wherewithal ~o answer simple questions about a text, one had to provide it with an organized world in which assumptions are inferred, in which exchanges are treated as part of a coherent and minim-fly redundant text, in which things allow for certain actions and relations and not others, and for which it is unclear how to store the information about the world in such a way that it is accessible for all its possible purposes and delivered up in an appropriate way. Some of these were providahle and some weren't. Some AI workers have already moved into the phenomenological perspective, Just from confronting these problems --a long way to go from the assumptions of m~thematics, science, and engineering that they originally brought to the task.