There are two main reasons for this: (1) formalisations of information structure often use variants of higherorder logic to characterise its semantic impact (Krifka, 1993;Kruijff-Korbayova, 1998;Steedman, 2000), which limits the use of inference in practice (Blackburn and Bos, 2003); and (2) the effect of information structure on the compositional semantics of an utterance is rarely worked out in enough detail useful for computational implementation.
exploring information structure in spoken dialogue systems is becoming realistic now because of the recent advances made in text-to-speech synthesisers and automated speech recognisers -hence there is a growing need for computational implementations of information structure in grammar formalisms.