Anaphora and Logical Form: On Formal Meaning Representations for Natural Language

Abstract

We argue, on favor of representations. We then adopt funct ion " for repre sentation, identifying th of anaphoric sugge sts c prope rties of a facil itate th possi ble ante appro priate re with such pro possi ble to de rich class of a 1. to provide a computational approach to certain problems in anaphora in natural language; 2. to argue in favor of formal meaning representation languages (MRLs) for natural language. These two objectives are not independent. It appears that the solutions to certain problems in anaphora are best formulated with respect to an appropriately structured logical MRL, so that the structural entities out of which such an MRL is composed suggest possible antecedents for anaphor resolution. More specifically, we have set ourselves the following problem: what form should a meaning representation assume in order to facilitate the identification of possible antecedents of anaphorlc expressions, and ~what computational mechanisms does this task require? Moreover, we have chosen to investigate this problem of identifying a set of possible antecedents without