ISSUQS in Natural

I. Introduction Two premises, reflected in the title, underlie the perspective from which I will consider research in natural language processing in this paper.* First, progress on building computer systems that process natural languages in any meaningful sense (i.e., systems that interact reasonably with people in natural language) requires considering language as part of a larger communicative situation. In this larger situation, the participants in a conversation and their states of mind are as important to the interpretation of an utterance as the linguistic expressions from which it is formed. A central concern when language is considered as communication is its function in building and using shared models of the world. Indeed, the notion of a shared model is inherent in the word "communicate," which is derived from the Latin communi Preparation of this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCS76-220004, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-79C0118 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command.