Computing Perspective in Text - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 210

11.1.1 T EXT WITH A DISPERSED CODING OF THE STAR-1
Jan. 16th, 1832 - The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate
aspect. The volcanic fire of past ages, and the scorching heat of the tropical sun, have in most
places rendered the soil steril and unfit for vegetation. The country rises in successive steps
of table land, interspersed with some truncate conical hills, and the horizon is bounded by an
irregular chain of more lofty mountains. The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of
this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just
walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of anything but his own
happiness.
Charles Darwin 1839, Voyage of the Beagle ,p.41
How is it possible for the speaker/writer to code a three-dimensional land-
scape into a one-dimensional sequence of word form surfaces which the
hearer/reader can decode into an image of that same three-dimensional land-
scape in his or her mind? And not only is a landscape described by this string
of word forms, but also are the author's feelings of going on land after a long
voyage in the confined quarters of the HMS Beagle . 1
The DBS answer has three parts. The first part is the implementation of
concepts for the agent's basic recognition and action procedures, which are
reused as the core values in the language proplets constituting the text's con-
tent (lexical semantics). The second part is the functor-argument and coor-
dination structure of the text's content, based on the lexical proplet structure
of the word forms and their time-linear concatenation (compositional seman-
tics). The third part is the anchoring of the text's content to the STAR-1 of its
utterance 2 (pragmatics).
The latter raises the question of where the reader can find the values of a
written sign's STAR-1. For a human reader, finding these values in a book
is usually easy, even if they are dispersed in various places, as in the above
example: The S value Por to Praya of the appropriate STAR-1 is embedded
into the first sentence of the text. The T value 1832-01-16 is given as the
diary date Jan. 16th, 1832 preceding the text. The A value equals the author,
as stated on the topic's cover. And the R value is the general readership.
Other possible choices are the S value London and the T value 1839 for
where and when, respectively, the topic was first published. These may be ap-
propriate for another text, but not for our example. Such ambiguities between
appropriate and inappropriate STAR-1 values present a difficulty for an ar-
tificial agent. They may be resolved by standardizing the specification of the
STAR-1 for newly written texts and by defining templates for different kinds of
topics and different authors for existing texts - plus human help when needed.
1 The Beagle was a British Cherokee class sailing ship designed in 1807.
2 I.e., the speaker/writer's perspective from the utterance situation towards the STAR-0 origin of the
content.