Three views of text-meaning compete in the philosophy of language: objective, subjective, and authorial --- ``in'' the text, or ``in'' the reader, or ``in'' the writer. Computational linguistics has ignored the competition and implicitly embraced all three, and rightly so; but different views have predominated at different times and in different applications. Contemporary applications mostly take the crudest view: meaning is objectively ``in'' a text. The more-sophisticated applications now on the horizon, however, demand the other two views: as the computer takes on the user's purpose, it must also take on the user's subjective views; but sometimes, the user's purpose is to determine the author's intent. Accomplishing this requires, among other things, an ability to determine what could have been said but wasn't, and hence a sensitivity to linguistic nuance. It is therefore necessary to develop computational mechanisms for this sensitivity.
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