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<Paper uid="W06-1308">
  <Title>Sydney, July 2006. c(c)2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Resolution of Referents Groupings in Practical Dialogues</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the course of a discourse or a dialogue, referents introduced separately could be referenced with a single plural expression (pronoun, demonstratives, etc.). The grouping of these referents may depend on many factors: it may be explicit if they were syntactically coordinated or juxtaposed or implicit if they just share common semantic features (Eschenbach et al., 1989). Time is also an important factor while it may be difficult to group old mentioned referents with new ones. Because of this multiplicity of factors, choosing the right discursive grouping for a referential plural expression is ambiguous, and this ambiguity needs to be explicitly described.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We present a model of grouping based on reference domains theory (Salmon-Alt, 2001) that considers that a reference operation consists of extracting a referent in a domain. However the original theory barely takes into account plural reference. This paper shows how several entities can be grouped together by building a new domain and how they can be accessed later on. It introduces also the notion of super-domain D+ that represents the access structure to all the plural referents of type D. This work is currently being implemented and evaluated in the MEDIA project of the EVALDA framework, a national french understanding evaluation campaign (Devillers, 2004).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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