Fragments

In dialogue, more than in (written) text, utterances often consist not of full grammatical sentences, but of fragments which may not even correspond to standard syntactic constituents. Fragments are a challenge for input analysis, because of their syntactic ill-formedness, but also because they can only be interpreted in the larger context, and it needs to be determined how to properly fit a fragment into a context, i.e., what the fragment attaches to. For instance, GoDIS implements Ginzburg's proposal to interpret fragments with respect to the top-most question under discussion in the current information state. Fragments are also challenging on the output generation side, for reasons of efficiency and naturalness: properly fragmentary output generated by the system may be easier to understand for a user than a complete grammatically well-formed output.

• SHARDS: corpus investigation of fragments [Fernandéz and Ginzburg2003]; fragment interpretation in an ISU-based formal model [Purver and Fernandéz2003]; grammatical framework for fragment resolution (in HPSG) [Fernandéz
  2#2
  2003]
• non-SHARDS: [Schlangen and Lascarides2003]; [Pfleger
  2#2
  2003]; GoDiS [Larsson2002a]