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<Paper uid="P90-1009">
  <Title>DESIGNER DEFINITES IN LOGICAL FORM</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="62" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A goal of natural language research is to provide a computer model capable of understanding English sentences. One approach to constructing this model requires the generation of an unambiguous internal representation for each sentence before attempting to represent subsequent sentences. Natural language systems that attempt to guess the intended meaning of a sentence without considering subsequent sentences usually make no provision for recovery from incorrect guesses since that would require storing information about the ambiguity of the sentence. Hence, this approach may require the processing of several sentences before enough information is available to determine the intended meaning of the sentence being represented. However, in order to make the inferences necessary to resolve some ambiguities, some internal representation is needed for both the current sentence as well as subsequent sentences. A more powerful approach is to leave the ambiguity unresolved in an intermediate representation until the necessary information has been processed. We adopt this second approach, which advocates mapping parsed sentences into an intermediate level of representation called logical form *This paper contains results from the author's thesis in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. The paper has benefited from discussions with Eugene Charniak, Kate Sanders, Leora Morgenstern, Tom Dean, Paul Harper and Frederic Evans. The work was supported in part by the NSF grants IST 8416034 and IST 8515005, ONR grant N00014-79-C-0529, and AFOSR grant F49620-88-c-0132.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  ifies the meaning of a sentence based on syntactic and sentence-level information, without considering the effect ofpragmatics and context. Later, as more information becomes available, the representation of the sentence is incrementally updated until all ambiguities have been resolved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In the literature, two sources of ambiguity have been handled using logical form, quantifier scoping (see \[SP84; Al187\]) and pronoun resolution (see \[Har88; Har90\]). In this paper, we will discuss the use of logical form for handling the ambiguities in the meanings of singular definite noun phrases. But first, it will be useful to briefly review the logical form for pronouns.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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