Abstract
Conditional utterances can be used in discourse as answers to regular, non-conditional questions in situations of partial knowledge of the answerer. We claim that the probabilities assigned to possible epistemic states of A are a measure of the utility of conditional answers. A second criterion that makes a conditional answer ‘if p, then q’ relevant has to do with the dependency between p and q that is conveyed in the statement. A conditional answer counts as relevant when this dependency leads the question asker to shift from a decision problem about q to an alternative, easier, decision problem about p.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.pam-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Gothenburg
- Editors:
- Christine Howes, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Adam Ek, Vidya Somashekarappa
- Venue:
- PaM
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 26–33
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.pam-1.4
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jos Tellings. 2020. Conditional answers and the role of probabilistic epistemic representations. In Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020), pages 26–33, Gothenburg. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Conditional answers and the role of probabilistic epistemic representations (Tellings, PaM 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/2020.pam-1.4.pdf