Investigation of processing strategies for the structural analysis of arguments

Abstract

This paper outlines research on processing strategies being developed for a language understanding system, designed to interpret the structure of arguments. For the system, arguments are viewed as trees, with claims as fathers to their evidence. Then understanding becomes a problem of developing a representative argument tree, by locating each proposition of the argument at its appropriate place. The processing strategies we develop for the hearer are based on expectations that the speaker will use particular coherent transmission strategies and are designed to be fairly efficient (work in linear time). We also comment on the use by the speaker of linguistic clues to indicate structure, illustrating how the hearer can interpret the clues to limit his processing search and thus improve the complexity of the understanding process.