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<Paper uid="C82-2005">
  <Title>SUBORDINATE CLAUSES AND BELIEF - DOMAINS IN VERBAL INFORMATION PROCESSING</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
SUBORDINATE CLAUSES AND BELIEF - DOMAINS IN VERBAL
INFORMATION PROCESSING
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Istv~n B~tor~ EWH Koblenz, Sen~nar fur Informatih, Sehwerpunkt Lin6~tettk Rheinau 3-4, D-5400 Koblenz There is agreement among ltn6~/stB , logicians and computer linguists on the treatment of belief-statements as embedded, hierarchical structures. On the syntactic level of analysis lin6ulsts treat belief-statements as subordinate clauses (S-over-S-structures, LYONS 1977, KAPLAN and BRESNAN 1981, etc.).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> On the semantic level of analysis, following the lo~o81 tradition, they are manifested as predicate formulae, in which full propositions are used as arguments in higher predicates (e.go CRESSWELL 1973). In computational treatments acoordin~ly the recovery of the hierarchical propositional structures is considered as primary objective: The informat-Ion conveyed by a belief-statement is presumed to be stored (or retrieved) in a data base as some kind of nested (S-over-S) structure (e.g. RUSTIN 1973, EISENEERG 1977). Consider the sentence (borrowed from Lyons, slightly modified):  b) recover the structure of P2 d) process the structure P2 This scheme will be referred in the following as the standard model.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Due to unsolved problems in evaluation of composite predicates and to the extremely high computational costs embedded structures are avoided in application systems (such as USL, ~DIS, HAM-RPU, of. BOLC 1980). Moreover the superimposed predicate appears from the point of view of the (embedded) lower predicate as purely accidente~. The dome~n-concept of beliefs avoids some of the difficulties of the 8tande4rd model. Considering the-basic con~nunicative function of human language the information conveyed by a verbal statement should be decomposed into two components: 1. semantic (material) information and 2. modal information conoer~ng belief-statue of the statement (UNG~ 1972). The fundamental difference between the two kinds of information should be reflected in the linguistic design and should be taken into consideration in models for man-machine con~nunioation. Accordingly the comunication partners dispose of belief-registers in addition to the information registers (as it is the case in current systems). The belief-register provides a belief-~ent and a belief-value (belief-oertitute) for each statement received. It is natura~ to i~itialize at the beginning of a discourse a number of belief-domePSne for the EGO, the PARTNER and the PERSONS MENTIONED. Notice that these processing frames (in the technical sense of the word, like in ~TZING 1980) are necessary in any system aiming at the same degree of sophistication.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> - 26 Zn case of overtly marked belief-agents the objective of analysts is the proper asstg~aent to a belief-don~tn and not the recover7 of a structure. This means that expensive reoover~j procedures can be dispensed with, since the surface structure usually provides tnnedAate keys for the proper assignment of belief-agents. Each belief-s~ent has his own domain of beliefs. In actual oom~unAcation the appearenoe of a partner A initializes a do,wAn of A'. As soon as in the conversation further actants B, C, D etc. occur there will be ocr~esponding new belief-do~ains Bdeg, Cdeg, D&amp;quot; etc. initialised. Statements overtly ~rked in view of a belief-agent will be transferred to the corresponding donntin.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> For u~arked statements a general strategy of assi~ent of default values can be developed along the lines of Gri0e and of MEGGLE (1981). Havi~ initialized the appropriate belief-frwne with the appropriate belief-a~ent, there is a particular domain of each belief-agent. In the case of (1) there is a belief-do.An called &amp;quot;world-of-M~-Smith&amp;quot; within the ttuiverse of discourse. The prooesaing involvess (5) a)lo0ate belief-domain by belief-s~ent key (- Mr Smith) b) enter/retrieve p in the activated belief-don~in and o) determine ourx~nt de~'ee of certitude (~ to believe) The present concept of belief-donuiins should be regarded in a more general procedural view of language, such as presented in B~TORI (1981). The 8u~ested treatment of belief-domains as pointer based areas in DB is another instance of prooedux~al solutions, in which d~nsmic language structures turn out to be simpler than their static, purely representionally oriented description. On the linguistic level of analysis the domain concept of beliefs is motivated by the observation that the superimposition of belief-structures on statements does not make the comprehension of these sentences more difficult, at least not in the measure as the processing of the embedded structures in the standard model would let this to - 27 expect. Even if storing S-over-S structures cannot be dispensed with entirely, the number of their occurrences in actual analysis-procedures can be substantially reduced. Notice that the concept of belief-domains provides a framework to treat opaque references i~ a natural way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In the final version of the presentation it will be attempted to substantiate the proposed model on the treatment of belief-agents and esp. of their derivation from agents and subjects across clause boundaries.</Paragraph>
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