The incremental algorithm introduced in (Dale and Reiter, 1995) for producing distinguishing descriptions does not always generate a minimal description. In this paper, I show that when generalised to sets of individuals and disjunctive properties, this approach might generate unnecessarily long and ambiguous and/or epistemically redundant descriptions. I then present an alternative, constraint...

This paper reports a completed stage of ongoing research at the University oF York. Landsbergen's advocacy of analytical inverses ~or compositional suntax rules encourages the application of Definite Clause Grammar techniques to the cons-t~uction of a parser returning Montague analysis trees. A parser MDCg is presented which implements an augmented Friedman-Warren algorithm permitting post refe...

In this paper we prove two theorems relating positive definite measures to induced representations. The first shows how the injection of a positive definite measure on a topological group H into a containing locally compact group G in which H is closed gives rise to induced representations. The second is another version of Mackey's imprimitivity theorem, along the lines of Loomis' proof [5]. We...

Semantic accounts of the definite article have tended to fall into two general classes: ‘uniqueness’ accounts (Russell, 1905), and ‘familiarity’ accounts (Heim, 1982; see also Abbott, 2004, inter alia). It is also generally known that there are instances of definite descriptions that are resistant to such analyses, and are difficult to subsume under either treatment, or even a combination of bo...