About Some Relationships between Knowledge and Context

Argumentation, 1989

In spite of alleged differences in purpose, descriptive and computational linguistics share many problems, due to the fact that any precise study on language needs some form of knowledge representation. This constraint is mostly apparent when interpretation of sentences takes into account elements of the so-called "context". The parametrization of context, i.e. the explicit listing of features relevant to some interpretation task, is difficult because it requires flexible formal structures for understanding or simulating inferential behaviour, as well as a large amount of information about conventional structures in the given language. This paper aims at illustrating major difficulties in these two fields, in relation with the necessity of a contextual approach. It offers a (clearly partial) enumeration of open problems in the representation of commonsense knowledge and language-dependent structures, with some attempt to delineate future solutions.

2005

Although the notion of context has been studied by several disciplines such as pragmatics, natural language semantics, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, there is no standard concept, theory or model. This overview describes engineering, cognitive and sociological approaches to context. It encompasses theories, models and applications of this notion.

2006

In previous work, we have defined conceptual foundations that can be beneficially used in context modeling. These conceptual foundations include the separation of entity and context, and the characterization of context as either Intrinsic or Relational. This paper aims at extending this approach by introducing the ontological concept of Situation as means of composing the elements of our ontology (entities, intrinsic and relational contexts) to model particular states of affairs of interest. Our concepts have been inspired by and aligned with conceptual theories from the fields of philosophy and cognitive sciences.

2006

In previous work, we have defined conceptual foundations that can be beneficially used in context modeling. These conceptual foundations include the separation of entity and context, and the characterization of context as either Intrinsic or Relational. This paper aims at extending this approach by introducing the ontological concept of Situation as means of composing the elements of our ontology (entities, intrinsic and relational contexts) to model particular states of affairs of interest. Our concepts have been inspired by and aligned with conceptual theories from the fields of philosophy and cognitive sciences.

Minds and Machines, 1999

CHRISTOPHER MENZEL Department of Philosophy, Texas AhIM University, College Station, Texas 77843-4237 USA (email: cmenzel@tamu.edu) Abstract. In this paper, an “objective” conception of contexts based loosely upon situation theory is developed and ...

Journal of Advanced Nursing

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The first International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-97) held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on February 4-6, 1997. This article provides a summary of the presentations and discussions during the three days with a focus on context in applications. The notion of context is far from defined and is dependent in its interpretation on a cognitive science versus an engineering (or system building) point of view. However, the conference make it possible to identify new trends in the formalization of context at a theoretical level as well as in the use of context in real-world applications. Results presented at the conference are ascribed in the realm of the works on context over the past few years at specific workshops and symposia. The diversity of the attendees' origins (Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, etc.) demonstrates that there are different types of context, not a unique one. For instance, logicians model context at the level of the knowledge representation and the reasoning mechanisms while cognitive scientists consider context at the level of the interaction between two agents (i.e., two humans or a human and a machine). In the later case, there are now strong arguments proving that one can speak of context only in reference to its use (e.g., context of an item or of a problem solving exercise). Moreover, there are different types of context that are interdependent. This makes it possible to understand why despite the consensus on some context aspects, agreement on the notion of context is not yet achieved.

Based on our experience in the development of an interactive system for the control of subway lines, we set forward some notions about various forms of context and about context sharing. In effect, context plays a crucial role especially for incident solving on a subway line. The analysis of operators' behavior doing incident solving proved that context takes three different forms, namely external and contextual knowledge and proceduralized context. Moreover, the paper discusses the dynamics between these three kinds of context.