New Book: INFORMATION SHARING

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the publication of:

INFORMATION SHARING: REFERENCE AND PRESUPPOSITION IN LANGUAGE
GENERATION AND INTERPRETATION, Kees van Deemter (Information
Technology Research Institute) and Rodger Kibble (Goldsmiths
College), eds.;paper ISBN: 1-57586-404-5, $30.00, cloth ISBN:
1-57586-403-7, $75.00, 429pages. CSLI Publications 2002.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

This book introduces the concept of information sharing as an area of
cognitive science. Information sharing is defined here as the process
by which speakers depend on `given' information (i.e., information
already shared with the hearer from previous communication) when they
convey `new' information   (i.e., information assumed to be new to
the hearer).  Information sharing is a key concept in linguistics and
philosophy, where it is related to notions like presupposition,
anaphora, focus, and indexicality.  It is also perceived as crucial
in various areas of language engineering because computer-based
processing of language and speech relies heavily on the computer's
ability to distinguish between given and new information.

Where previous work in information sharing is often fragmented
between different academic disciplines (in  particular, between
linguistics and computer science),  the present volume brings
together theoretical and  applied work, and it joins computational
contributions with papers based on an analysis of language corpora
and  on psycholinguistic experimentation. A remarkable number of the
contributions take a generation-oriented, rather than an
interpretation-oriented perspective, asking what is the most
appropriate verbal expression of an item  of information in a given
situation.

------------------------------