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Recognition of referring expressions 
(Statement of Research Interests) 
Stig W. Jorgensen 
M.A., Research Fellow 
Dept. of Computational Linguistics 
Copenhagen Business School 
Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg 
swj. ID@cbs. dk 
May 14, 1997 
Computational models of referring such as those of Kronfeld (1990) and 
Heeman & Hirst (1995), being based on the view of language as goal-directed 
behaviour, assume that the act of referring includes making the hearer recognize 
the speaker's communicative goal. My present work centres on the question of 
how we recognize an expression as a referring expression, i.e. how do we know 
that the use of a noun phrase is intended to indicate a particular object? Work- 
ing in a Kronfeldian framework, I assume that referring consists of a "literal 
goal" (making the hearer recognize the np as a referring expression) and a "dis- 
course purpose" (making the hearer recognize and apply the right "identification 
constraints", such as the requirement that the referent should be identified per- 
ceptually, or should be identified with an entity introduced at a previous stage 
in the discourse). I propose that in some cases the recognition of the np as a 
referring expression depends on the recognition of the identification constraints. 
I work primarily with referring in the literary mode, looking for computation- 
ally manageable triggers such as lexical anchorings and information derivable 
from knowledge of genre, but I am also concerned with the questions of whether 
a unified approach to referring is possible and the extent to which text-based 
models can be generalized to a multimodal context. 
