This is no accident. The work is an extension of my advisor Mark Steedman's research on ontology and reference in temporal semantics. My ongoing research is concerned with exploring this potential relationship between computational semantics and an interdisciplinary approach to pragmatics. This research is situated within a view of meaningful interaction whose antecedents are Richmond Thomason's elegant reworking of Paul Grice's description of communication in terms of intention recognition and Herbert Clark's influential approach to language use as joint activity. Here is the general picture.
Conversation consists of joint activity undertaken in support of common goals.
This joint activity defines a conversational process which people engage in intentionally and collaboratively, and, we might even suppose, rationally. The fundamental component of conversational process is the coordination by which speakers manifest and hearers recognize communicative intentions vehicled by linguistic actions. Computational dialogue agents, such as Justine Cassell's REA at MIT, increasingly implement rich models of conversational process. The conversational process has as its object plans for the respondent to say certain words to convey certain information. Communicative intent merely describes the utterances of words and linguistic constructions, spells out the meanings of those utterances, and shows how these utterances, with these meanings, could contribute structure, representing propositions and intentions, to the conversational record , an evolving abstract model of the the dialogue.