<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C04-1181">
  <Title>Interpreting Vague Utterances in Context</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="2" end_page="2" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Assessment and Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In our approach, we specify a genuinely vague semantics: vague words evoke a domain-specific scale that can differentiate alternative domain individuals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> To find a unique interpretation for a vague utterance, we leverage ordinary inference about the domain, task, and linguistic context to recover implicit thresholds on this scale.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We believe that further methodological advances will be required to evaluate treatments of vagueness in indefinite reference, such as that considered here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> For example, obviously the very idea of a &amp;quot;gold standard&amp;quot; for resolution of vagueness is problematic. We believe that the best argument for a theory of vagueness in a language interface would show that naive users of the interface are, on the whole, likely to accept its vague interpretations and unlikely to renegotiate them through clarification. But the experiment would have to rule out confounding factors such as poorly-modeled lexical representation and context tracking as sources for system interpretations that users reject.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We intend to take up the methodological challenges necessary to construct such an argument in future work. In the meantime, while our current implementation of FIGLET exhibits the promising behavior discussed in this paper and illustrated in Figures 1-4, some minor engineering unrelated to language understanding remains before a fruitful evaluation can take place. As alluded to above, the tight integration of contextual reasoning and interpretation that FIGLET carries out can be expensive if not pursued efficiently. While our initial implementation achieves a level of performance that we accept as researchers (interpretation times of between one and a few tens of seconds), evaluation requires us to improve FIGLET's performance to levels that experimental participants will accept as volunteers. Our analysis of FIGLET indicates that this performance can in fact be achieved with better-regimented domain problem-solving.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Nevertheless, we emphasize the empirical and computational arguments we already have in support of our model. Our close links with the linguistic literature mean that major empirical errors would be surprising and important across the language sciences. Indeed, limited evaluations of treatments of vague definite reference using standards of differentiation or very similar ideas have been promising (Gorniak and Roy, In Press). The computational appeal is that all the expensive infrastructure required to pursue the account is independently necessary.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Once this infrastructure is in place the account is readily implemented with small penalty of performance and development time. It is particularly attractive that the approach requires minimal lexical knowledge and training data. This means adding new vague words to an interface is a snap.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Overall, our new model offers three contributions. Most importantly, of course, we have developed a computational model of vagueness in terms of underspecified quantitative constraints. But we have also presented a new demonstration of the importance and the feasibility of using multidimensional representations of dialogue context in understanding descriptions of quantitative domains. And we have introduced an architecture for resolving underspecification through uniform pragmatic mechanisms based on context-dependent collaboration.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Together, these developments allow us to circumscribe possible resolutions for underspecified utterances, to zero in on those that the speaker and hearer could adopt consistently and collaboratively, and so to constrain the speaker's intended meaning to within a natural range.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>