---
title: "An Integrated Framework for Semantic and — Pollack 1988"
description: "Purely compositional semantics struggles because an utterance's meaning depends on context as well as syntax."
authors: ["Martha E. Pollack", "Fernando C.N. Pereira"]
year: 1988
venue: "26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P88-1010/"
doi: "10.3115/982023.982033"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pollack-1988-integrated-framework-semantic-pragmatic-interpretation/"
---
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# An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation

**Authors:** Martha E. Pollack, Fernando C.N. Pereira · **Year:** 1988 · **Venue:** 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P88-1010/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P88-1010.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/982023.982033](https://doi.org/10.3115/982023.982033) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2140404954)

**Citations:** 26 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · 11 in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Purely compositional semantics struggles because an utterance's meaning depends on context as well as syntax. Pragmatic choices, such as resolving a pronoun or fixing quantifier scope, often need information from syntactically distant parts of the sentence. Pollack and Pereira propose a framework that keeps most of the advantages of compositionality while letting these decisions happen in a flexible order.

Starting from least-commitment parse trees, each phrase receives a conditional interpretation. This pairs a context-independent sense with a set of assumptions about pragmatic processing still to be done. Declarative semantic-interpretation rules build these structures compositionally. Optional pragmatic-discharge rules then eliminate assumptions by consulting, and updating, a structured discourse context. An interpretation counts as complete once no assumptions remain.

The mechanism was implemented in Prolog inside the Candide knowledge-acquisition system. It handles interacting phenomena such as donkey sentences, where reference and quantification must be settled jointly. The work offers a principled middle ground between rigidly ordered and loosely controlled ways of combining semantics and pragmatics.

## Key points
- **Two kinds of assumptions.** A conditional interpretation is a pair: a sense plus a set of assumptions.
  - *bind* introduces a new parameter and constrains how it is bound.
  - *restrict* further narrows an existing parameter.
- **Two kinds of rules.**
  - Semantic-interpretation rules are obligatory. They look only at syntactic types and assumption types, never at constituent senses.
  - Pragmatic-discharge rules are optional. They act as four-place relations that also update the context.
- **Four-part discourse context.**
  - Immediate context supports intrasentential anaphora.
  - Local context handles pronouns via centering (Grosz et al.).
  - Global context is a focus stack used for definite anaphora.
  - A knowledge base completes the structure.
- **Implementation.** The system is part of Candide, a multimodal tool for building procedural networks for the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS). It was applied to NASA space shuttle malfunction procedures.
- **Control and positioning.**
  - Search uses depth-first exploration, early discharge, breadth-first search over alternative bindings, and bounds on assumption percolation.
  - The approach generalizes Cooper storage and Woods's computational analogue of it.
  - The authors contrast it with Pundit, which they see as overconstrained, and Tacitus, which they see as underconstrained.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{pollack1988integrated,
  title = {{An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation}},
  author = {Pollack, Martha E. and Pereira, Fernando C.N.},
  booktitle = {26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1988},
  doi = {10.3115/982023.982033},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/982023.982033}
}
```

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## References

30 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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