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<Paper uid="P85-1027">
  <Title>ANAPHORA RESOLUTION: SHORT-TERM MEMORY AND FOCUSING RAYMONDE GUINDON Microeleotronlcs and Computer Technology Corporation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
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ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Anaphora resolution is the process of determining the referent of ~uaphors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> such as definite noun phrases and pronouns, in a discourse. Computational linguists, in modeling the process of anaphora resolution, have proposed the notion of focusing. Focusing is the process, engaged in by a reader, of selecting a subset of the discourse items and maJPSing them highly available for further computations. This paper provides a cognitive basis for anaphora resolution and focusing. Human memory is divided into a short-term, an operating, and a long-term memory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Short-term memory can only contain a small number of meaning units and its retrieval time is fast. Short-term memory is divided into a cache and a buffer. The cache contains a subset of meaning units expressed in the previous sentences and the buffer holds a representation of ~he incoming sentence. Focusing is realized in ~he cache that contains a subset of the most topical units and a subset of the mos~ recent units in the text. The information stored in the cache is used to integrate ~he incoming sentence with the preceding discourse. Pronouns should be used to refer to units in focus. Operating memory contains a very large number of units but its re~rleval time is slow.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> It contains the previous tex~ units that are not in the cache. It comprises the tex~ units not in focus. Definite noun phrases should be used to refer to unite not in focus. Two empirical studies are described that demonstrate the cognitive basis for focusing, the use of definite noun phrases to refer to antecedents not in focus, and the use of pronouns to refer to antecedents in focus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The goal of thls research is to show the relation between the psychological work on anaphora resolution based on the notion of a limited short-term or working memory and the computational linguistics work based on the notion of focusing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> This rapprochement is important for the following reasons: I) From a theoretical viewpoint.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> cognitive evidence increases the validity of the computational notion of focus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> 2) Focusing corresponds to one of the reader's comprehension processes and it needs to be incorporated in the model of the user in language understanding systems to adequately resolve am~iguitles in the user's utterances and to handle language generation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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