Context is hard. Let’s go shopping!

I pointed out a curiosity to my linguistics students: we can see that all the following sentences could be construed as a request to open the window.

• Please open the window.
• I need someone to open the window.
• It’s hot in here.

Of course, that last one only works in certain cases, namely if you’re willing and able to open the window, and I say it in such a way that you realise I’m not just making an idle comment on the room temperature.

The curiosity, though, is these two sentences.

• It’s hot in here.
• It’s cold in here.

Both of these could encode the same request.

My students had two ready answers for this:
1. We have a lot of real-world knowledge about what windows are for, and the likely effects of opening one.
2. We have an understanding of context.

But context is a horribly complex and poorly-defined notion. Our context involves all the objects around us, our goals and reasons for being where we are, the sum total of our cultural knowledge, everything we see and everything we know. Yet somehow we are able to quickly weed out all the extraneous information and decide what aspects of our context are relevant to the utterance at hand.

An example of this:
1) I pulled a real Homer Simpson last night.
2) I was at a restaurant last night, and I pulled a real Homer Simpson.

The interpretation for 1) may be that I did something pathologically stupid, or (if you saw the relevant episode) I fluked a victory. However, the inclusion of ‘restaurant’ in 2) leads us to another interpretation: I made a pig of myself.

Is Homer Simpson contextual? Here, certainly, but not in every conversation. To make this kind of reference, I make a guess about your cultural knowledge and ability to decode the reference, I bring the Homer reference up out of nowhere, and then I go on with the utterance as though nothing happened.

This is the kind of thing that gives us dialogue modelers conniptions.