J. Bell. Pragmatic reasoning: Inferring contexts. In P. Bouquet, L. Serafini, P. Brézillon, M. Benerecetti, and F. Castellani, editors, Modeling and Using Context, volume 1688 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 42–53. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, second international and interdisciplinary conference, context99, trento, italy, september 1999, proceedings edition, 1999. [url]

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This paper describes an approach to use pragmatic reasoning for inferring context: “The process of inferring a context involves making assumptions about what is normal or typical or conventional on the basis of the given context, and usign pragmatic (context-sensitive) rules to extend the given context on the basis of these assumption.”

For the author, inferring context can be seen as a bootstrapping process: a given partial context suggests appropriate assumptions which are then used with pragmatic rules to extend it. The extended context then suggests further assumptions, leading to further extensions.

In the author’s implementation, a Kamp and Reyle framework of discourse representation structures (DRSs) is used to exemplify discourse cohesion and provide incremental interpretation.