@inproceedings{Hirst9,
  author = "Graeme Hirst",
  title = "Context as a spurious concept",
  booktitle = "Proceedings, Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics",
  address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
  month = "February",
  year = "2000",
  pages = "273--287",
  note = "Supersedes 1997 version",
  abstract = "I take issue with AI formalizations of context, primarily the
              formalization by McCarthy and Buvac, that regard context as an
              undefined primitive whose formalization can be the same in many
              different kinds of AI tasks.  In particular, any theory of context in
              natural language must take the special nature of natural language into
              account and cannot regard context simply as an undefined primitive.  I
              show that there is no such thing as a coherent theory of context
              <I>simpliciter</I>---context pure and simple---and that context in
              natural language is not the same kind of thing as context in KR.  In
              natural language, context is <B>constructed</B> by the speaker and the
              interpreter, and both have considerable discretion in so doing.
              Therefore, a formalization based on pre-defined contexts and
              pre-defined `lifting axioms' cannot account for how context is used in
              real-world language.",
  download = "http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-CICLing-2000.pdf"
}