creators_name: Akman, Varol editors_name: Buvac, Sasa editors_name: Iwanska, Lucja type: confpaper datestamp: 1998-06-24 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:59 metadata_visibility: show title: Context as a Social Construct ispublished: pub subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: comp-sci-lang subjects: ling-prag subjects: ling-sem subjects: phil-lang subjects: psy-ling full_text_status: public keywords: (situated) context, co-text, disambiguation, literary interpretation, literary theory, belief system, text, author, reader, authorial intentions. abstract: This position paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in AI to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to `interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Harris (1988), enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two thought-provoking papers in interpretation, (Barwise 1989) and (Hobbs 1990), are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. date: 1997 date_type: published publisher: The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California pagerange: 1-6 refereed: FALSE citation: Akman, Varol (1997) Context as a Social Construct. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/474/2/context.ps