Subject: Re: SUO: Re: Enhancing Data Interoperability with Ontologies... From: John Bateman Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 13:00:31 +0200 To: "John F. Sowa" CC: cg@cs.uah.edu, bobp@lightlink.com, standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org, "Norbert E. Fuchs" , rolfs I know reality is something that is unpleasant but: > CLCE already handles pronouns. > >> ... Do you think this paper is comprehensive >> enough, and the area solid enough, to produce >> a CLCE that can handle pronouns? > > > But they're called variables. But pullease. "... already handles..." makes it sound like a solved problem. For single sentences, yes, you can regard pronouns as variables. But the only real interest is then in *resolving* pronouns in text: i.e., working out what the variables refer to. That is not "handled" by any system, although with a good mixture of linguistic constraints and statistical measures and hierachies of thematic relations and a tracking of discourse focus via centering and other similar notions you can get up to around 90% in "well-behaved" texts. > You can use these pronouns by themselves as "X" > or you can use them as part of a referential noun > phrase, such as "the cat X". See the CLCE spec's. These are then not pronouns; they are proper names and do not have to be tracked according to discourse context. Which makes them trivial: which is good for CLCE but has little to do with "handling" pronouns. > And thanks for the reference to Kamp and Reyle. Maybe > I can find a tutorial on the web. The book is a tutorial, more or less. It is a basic introduction for students. There is also a lengthy encyclopedia entry on Hans Kamps' website. But there are also very many intros and no doubt on the web something basic. Sorry, but these posting strayed into linguistics again. John B.