Maria Boritchev will defend her thesis, conducted under the supervision of Maxime Amblard and Philippe de Groote: Dialogue Modeling in a Dynamic Framework, on Monday, November 22, at 2 p.m.online (in English).
Abstract:
Formal studies of discourse raise numerous interrogations on the nature and the definition of the way consecutive sentences coherently combine with one another. Language is intrinsically dynamic: in its semantics in context (e.g. use of references) and in the interaction (e.g. connections between dialogue acts). The shift from discourse to dialogue brings forward even more specific issues among which the ones related to questions and answers articulation. In order to address these issues, we start by focusing on questions from a semantic point of view. There are numerous existing formalisms and frameworks for formal semantics of declarative sentences and discourse; dialogue is broadly studied from a linguistic and Natural Language Processing point of view. The goal of our work is to bring classical formal semantics theories to use in a setting oriented towards real-life dialogue. This thesis presents a formal semantics account of dialogue in a type-theoretical dynamic framework. We produce a model of dialogue and in particular of the articulation of questions and answers by mingling Neo-Davidsonian Event Semantics (NDES, as presented in Champollion, 2017) with Inquisitive Semantics (IS, Ciardelli et al, 2017) in a compositional and dynamic way through the use of Continuation Style Dynamic Semantics (CSDS, de Groote, 2006, extended in Lebedeva,2012). Our model is rooted in a syntax-semantics interface implementation called Abstract Categorial Grammars (ACG, de Groote, 2001). Another way to address semantics of dialogue is through real-life data by putting our formal ideas in perspective by confronting them with field observation. To do so, we constituted a corpus, called Dialogues in Games (DinG), composed of transcriptions of recordings of people playing the board game Catan (in French). Our study focuses on real-life questions and answers in multilingual (English, French, Dutch, Mexican Spanish, Northern Italian, and Mandarin Chinese) oral data has resulted in several annotation schemas, part of which was applied to DinG.
Composition of the jury
Reviewers:
Mme Farah BENAMARA, Université Paul Sabatier
M. Jonathan GINZBURG, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7
Examiners:
Mme Ellen BREITHOLTZ, University of Gothenburg
Mme Iris TARAVELLA, Université Paris Nanterre
M. Miguel COUCEIRO, Université de Lorraine
Supervisors:
M. Maxime AMBLARD, Université de Lorraine
M. Philippe DE GROOTE, INRIA
