TomekStrzalkowski.PDF

N O N - S I N G U L A R C O N C E P T S IN N A T U R A L L A N G U A G E D I S C O U R S E T o m e k Strzalkowski Department of Computer Science Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences New York University 251 Mercer St. New York, NY 10012 U.S.A. Nick Cercone Centre for System Science School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia VSA I S 6 Canada We introduce a new approach to representing and manipulating various types of non-singular concepts in natural language discourse. The representation we describe is based on a partially ordered structure of levels in which the objects of the same relative singularity are assigned to the same level. Our choice of the representation has been motivated by the following main concerns: I. The representation should systematically distinguish between those language terms that are used to refer to objects of different singularity, that is, those classified within different but related levels of the model; 2. The representation should capture certain types of inter-sentential dependencies in discourse, most notably anaphoric-type cohesive links; 3. Finally, the representation should serve as a basis for defining a formal semanti