About — Contextual Grounding
Context and positioning.
Context
Meaning and interpretation are frequently underdetermined when expressions, representations, or outputs are considered in isolation.
Discourse history, shared assumptions, external evidence, environmental conditions, and task state can supply information that narrows the interpretation appropriate to a particular situation.
Differentiation
Contextual grounding differs from context availability alone: information may be present without being relevant to the expression or interpretation under consideration.
It also differs from factual correctness alone. A statement may be factually correct without being grounded in the context that is supposed to constrain the current interpretation.
System Role
Within bounded interpretive environments, contextual grounding functions as a relation between an available context source, context judged relevant, the grounding relation, and the resulting context-bounded interpretation.
The relation can occur in human communication, computational language systems, multimodal environments, evidence-based generation, and other settings without requiring a particular retrieval or model architecture.