A Simple-Minded Network Model with Context-like Objects - Bruce Edmonds
As has been frequently pointed out (e.g. by Pat Hayes [2]), there are many different meanings of "context". For example there is the context one may inhabit, the shared linguistic context which is used to enable effective communication and the specific mental constructs that acts as frameworks for inference and learning. Since my aim in this paper is to relate different kinds of context I want to abstract from these to possible shared properties, in order to motivate what follows.
To do this I concentrate on a mental-type construct since the other two are related to it. The context-one-may-inhabit only impinges upon me if I have perceived and represented it internally (though not necessarily symbolically), it is this internal reflection of the external context that is active from my point of view. The shared context-as-a-resource can be seen as comprising a set of internal contexts and some mechanism of reasoning about which is appropriate at any instance, for at any particular time the participants will need to have chosen an appropriate internal context from the context-as-a-resource in order to correctly interpret the communication. In these cases there is added complexity from the problem of how the participants select an internal context from either their perceptions of the environment or the communications of the other participants, but this does not stop us discussing the core of the composition of this common internal structure.
Although the model is based upon semantic-web models of (presumed) mental constructs, it is abstracted from it so as to be as general as possible. I call this a generalised context to indicate its distance from more grounded concerns about context.
In section 2 I list some properties of such a generalised conception of context; section 4 describes the basic model; section 5 discusses some simple extensions of the model and, finally, section 6 traces the relation of this model to other formalisations.
Generated with CERN WebMaker