Integrating Diverse Information Resources Into Dialogue Updates

Barwise and Perry (1983) treat meaning in terms of a relation between various information resources such as utterance events, background resource situations and visual scenes. They use this view to give an analysis of attitude relations such as believe and know. This can give us techniques for analyzing cases which need to integrate information sources based on diierent modalities. Here we point out that two of the classic puzzles in the analysis of the attitudes can be prootably viewed from the perspective of dialogue updates involving multimodal reasoning. We sketch a proposal for a formal analysis of multimodal information states which builds on a revision of the development of Barwise and Perry's ideas in Cooper (1996) and Cooper and Ginzburg (1996). It is inspired by a recent treatment of records and dependent record types by Betarte and Tasistro (forthcoming) within the framework of Martin-LL of type theory.

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