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<Paper uid="E85-1031">
  <Title>INTERPRETING SINGULAR DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS IN DATABASE QUERIES</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="213" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon of singular definite description in natural language processing constitutes a research program par excellence in the field of cognitive science. Not only does it involve the various cognitive disciplines but also the integration of the traditional levels of analysis, namely the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels as well as including a &amp;quot;performance&amp;quot; or processing level dealing with mechanisms for memory managment of referring expressions. Linguistic theories initially attempted to account for the syntactic conditions of well-formedness governing the introduction of sin~ular definite nounphrases in sentences by postulating co-referentiality with a previously occurring indefinite noun-phrase having the same referential index. But it became clear that the postulated requirements of co-referentiality could only be adequately stated by means of an extended notion of &amp;quot;discourse referent&amp;quot; (see Karttunen 1968 b).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Logicians and philosophers of language since Russell have studied problems of reference and of the logical form of referring expressions occurring in various contexts (for a selection, see Linsky 1971). But it was pointed out in Donnellan 1966 that a strictly truthfunctional analysis of singular definite expressions may in certain situations evaluate to a referent which was not intended by the speaker. Accounting for the intentions of the speaker introduces the pragmatic point of view of referring as a speech act (see Searle 1966). How the speaker proceeds in describing an object s/he has in mind so that it may be correctly identified by the hearer and how the hearer perceives the intentions of the speaker to accordingly process descriptions has been the object of psychologically oriented research in the area of definite reference (e.g. Clark/Marshall 1981 and Ortony-Anderson 1977). In Artificial Intelligence, research on definite descriptions has mainly proposed computational models to resolve anaphoric reference by postu21ating certain inference mechanisms (e.g. Charnlak 1972 and Rieger 1974) or mechanisms for detecting and managing dialogue focus (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Grosz 1981 and Sidner 1979).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Considering practical applications in the computer processing of natural language it may be said that next to none of this large body of research has been incorporated. Most natural language front-ends to a standard database system support none or very primitive reference resolution and treat the singular definite article as an existential quantifier. This state of affairs has frequently been motivated by the objection that most of the aforementioned research is not yet able to meet the challenge of a computationally efficient solution. It is hoped that such objections, though justified, \[see for example Berwick 1985) will diminish in the course of time. More telling are objections relating to the nature of the natural language interaction with a database system which is alleged to constitute a restricted discourse environment not displaying the more sophisticated features of natural dialogue. The present paper critically examines some characteristics of such interactions with respect to the processing of definite descriptions and investigates to what extent the research findings aluded to above ought to be incorporated. The paper is intended to give an overview of the pro- null blem domain rather than to offer concrete solutions ; in fact its aim is to point out areas where fruitful research is still outstanding.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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