Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The role of context in natural language under- standing ( N L U ) is generally accepted as being im- portant to the tcisk of ascertaining "correct mean- ing." This is particularly true during interpreta- tion of otherwise ambiguous language constructs, such as lexical ambiguity resolution, metaphor un- derstanding, and indirect speech act interpreta- tion. This paper presents a feedforward connec- tionist model called SAIL2 which utilizes the con- text obtained from the processing of previously seen text to help resolve the ambiguity inherent in indirect speech acts, specifically, in indirect re- quests.