On Laughter and Forgetting and Reconversing: A neurologically-inspired model of conversational context

We argue that phenomena from both dement- ive and neurotypical individuals motivate the need for a synthesis between existing formal semantic theories of dialogue context and the- ories of memory and emotion. We sketch here such a synthesis: we embed certain very transient aspects of dialogical semantic states as components of a Multicomponent Work- ing Memory (Baddeley, 2012) style working memory and we also sketch how to embed dialogues globally within Long Term Memory. We exemplify how the emergent framework can account for the conversational phenomena.