Incremental semantic construction in a dialogue system

Abstract

This paper describes recent work on the DynDial project ∗ towards incremental semantic interpretation in dialogue. We outline our domain-general grammar-based approach, using a variant of Dynamic Syntax integrated with Type Theory with Records and a Davidsonian event-based semantics. We describe a Java-based implementation of the parser, used within the Jindigo framework to produce an incremental dialogue system capable of handling inherently incremental phenomena such as split utterances, adjuncts, and mid-sentence clarification requests or backchannels. 1