Co-Indexing Labelled DRSs to Represent and Reason with Ambiguities

The paper addresses the problem of representing ambiguities in a way that allows for monotonic disambiguation and for direct deductive computation. The paper focuses on an extension of the formalism of underspecified DRSs to ambiguities introduced by plural NPs. It deals with the collective/distributive distinction, and also with generic and cumulative readings. In addition it provides a systematic account for an underspecified treatment of plural pronoun resolution.Comment: gzipped ps-file. To appear in: Stanley Peters, Kees van Deemter (1995): Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification, CSLI Publications, Stanfor

Vagueness, Ambiguity, and Underspecification

No abstract

Modelling discourse theory

Anaphora are hidden descriptions found in discourse, which refer to explicitly mentioned entities of the discourse e.g. Mary loves tennis, she plays everyday. Humans can expand anaphors into fuller descriptions with ease by using intuitive world knowledge, which links the anaphor with a suitable entity of the discourse. In the example above it is obvious to us that she may be expanded into, or refer to, the previously mentioned female entity Mary. As humans we do not allow she to refer to tennis, as intuitively we know that the female she must refer to another female entity. Modelling anaphora resolution or expansion is a difficult task as so much of what is communicated is implicit in discourse. This thesis investigates the historical development of existing methods of resolving anaphors within discourse, and aims at implementing one such mechanism using a small fragment of English

Switch-reference and logophoricity in discourse representation theory

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