This paper offers a method for determining referent (antecedent) of the noun phrase containing determiner "kono (this)" or "sono (that, its)" in Japanese. It uses in the determination of the antecedent a statistical measure of conceptual similarities, taken from a corpus, between each candidate for the antecedent and the modeficand of kono or sono. We describe our method and an algorithm. We th...

Standard Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) was designed mainly to explain the so-called donkey-sentences. The pronouns plaYing such a prominent role in all these sentences belong, however, exclusively to one (partlculaPly simple) type of pronoun. We try to extend DRT in order to cover an equally Important type of pronoun, the so-called etdes0rIptlonal,* pronoun. Discourse referents ape now ...

This paper looks at the phenomena of licensing by modification, whereby an unacceptable noun phrase is redeemed by the presence of a modifier or an unavailable reading for a noun phrase is made available with the addition of a modifier. It argues that an optimal account of such phenomena should derive these effects from the interaction of the meanings of individual expressions in the sentence r...

A comparison of four parsers was undertaken for noun phrase extraction − FastNPE, NPtool, Chopper, and AZ Phraser. FastNPE was found to be the fastest of the parsers, and NPtool the most accurate in extracting noun phrases. Both were subsequently implemented into the Concept Extractor module of the Interspace Prototype, which is described in detail.

This paper provides a formal semantic characterization of specificational copular clauses using the theory of noun phrase interpretation developed by Partee (1987). It is argued that specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of a predicative noun phrase with the subject position. This leads to the prediction that only noun phrases capable of denoting predicates can occur in this posi...