Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse
Computational Linguistics
Anaphora resolution: short-term memory and focusing
ACL '85 Proceedings of the 23rd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Plurals, cardinalities, and structures of determination
COLING '86 Proceedings of the 11th coference on Computational linguistics
Referential nets with attributes
COLING '82 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
The incremental generation of passive sentences
EACL '93 Proceedings of the sixth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Connection relations and quantifier scope
ACL '92 Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Resolution of referents groupings in practical dialogues
SigDIAL '06 Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue
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The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for the plural anaphor in question. As a means of explanation for preferred and non-preferred interpretations of plural anaphora, the concept of a Common Association Basis (CAB) for the potential atomic parts of a complex object is introduced in the following. CABs pose conceptual constraints on the formation of complex RefOs in general. We argue that in cases where a suitable CAB for the atomic RefOs introduced in the text exists, the corresponding complex RefO is constructed as early as in the course of processing the antecedent sentence and put into the focus domain of the discourse model. Thus, the search for a referent for a plural anaphor is constrained to a limited domain of RefOs according to the general principles of focus theory in NLP. Further principles of interpretation are suggested which guide the resolution of plural anaphora in cases where more than one suitable complex RefO is in focus.