Why is Monotonicity Relevant to NLP

Linguistic form exists at several levels, e.g.

• Syntax (dog bites man v. man bites dog)
• Morphology (The dogs eat v. the dog eats)
• Prosody (e.g. MIKE smiled; Mike SMILED?)
• Lexicon (``What is your position?" Lexical choice: ``lie" versus ``terminological inexactitude".
• Context, which may be linguistic or non linguistic:
  • Linguistic context: Caesar came. He saw.
  • Non-Linguistic context: time and place of an utterance.