Extending Schema-Based Reasoning to Cope with Multiple Descriptions

Understanding natural language frequently requires determining co-reference of diierent descriptions of the same action or object. Schema-based reasoning is a well-established technology for natural language understanding ; existing systems, however, do not cope with this problem in a suuciently general way. In this paper, we propose to address this de-ciency by augmenting a schema-based rea-soner with a special-purpose inference mechanism called redescription inference. Redescrip-tion inference builds on Charniak's notion of abductive uniication Charniak, 1988]. An implementation is in progress.