This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that “This. The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement.”), it is nevertheless very common in written text. Handling this usage poses a problem for Natural Language Understanding systems. The solution I propose is based on distinguishing between what can be pointed to and what can be referred to by virtue of pointing. I argue that a restricted set of discourse segments yield what such demonstrative pronouns can point to and a restricted set of what Nunberg (1979) has called referring functions yield what they can refer to by virtue of that pointing.

Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions...

NUMERICAL -- REAL -- PHYSICAL -- NON-STATIONARY -- COLLECTIVE TEMPORAL -- RELATIONAL -- EVENT -- Table 1.

Two independent mechanisms of context change have been discussed separately in the literature - context change by entity introduction and context change by event simulation. Here we discuss their integration. The effectiveness of the integration depends in part on a representation of events that captures people's uncertainty about their outcome - in particular, people's incomplete expectations about the changes effected by events. We propose such a representation and a process of accommodation that makes use of it, and discuss our initial implementa- tion of these ideas.

According to the received view in semantics, so-called unbound pronouns- pronouns not bound by a quantifier Q inside the smallest clause containing Q-should either be treated as abbreviations for the antecedent clause, or as variables

The main aim of this paper is to provide a new analysis of licensers of negative polarity items (NPIs). The problems with Fauconnier-Ladusaw's downward entailment analysis have been argued since Linebarger (1980). I will show that there exists a class of weak NPI licensers characterized by non-monotonicity and exclusivity. Weak negation, which is monotone decreasing, has been known to license weak NPIs such as any and ever (Zwarts 1993). However, non-monotonic items also trigger these wideners. Exclusivity or uniqueness characterizes non-monotonic operators, such as only, exactly n, superlatives, ordinal numerals, the determiner the, generic NPs, and also if and only if clauses, hope, happy, glad and others. Many of them function as generalized quantifiers which prohibit either downward or upward entailment. As Jespersen (1917) traces the origin of NPIs back to the strengthening of negation, non-monotonic contexts also favor strengthening by these words. We begin by considering the limited distribution of polarity items. The following section presents shortcomings of previous analyses, and then, non-monotonic expressions and their exclusivity are discussed. 1

In this paper I will give a modal two-dimensional analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. I will think of presupposition as a non-veridical propositional attitude. This allows me to evaluate what is presupposed and what is asserted at different dimensions without getting into the binding problem. What is presupposed will be represented by an accessibility relation between possible worlds. The major part of the paper consists of a proposal to account for the dependence of the interpretation of modal expressions, i.e. modal subordination, in terms of an accessibility relation as well. Moreover, I show how such an analysis can be extended from the propositional to the predicate logical level. 1

According to the pragmatic or functional conception of attitudes, we can say that John desires A iff John behaves such that he tends to bring it about that the actual world is an A-world, if his beliefs are true. This puts certain constraints on how to analyse desire attributions, but it leaves open a number of alternative analyses. Several alternatives will be discussed and compared in this paper. It will be suggested that for the semantic analysis of desire attributions it is useful to look at recent analyses of belief revision and theories of action and rational choice.

To my family

The ITP System for MUC3 is diagrammed in Figure 1. The three major modules handle different units of processing: the Message Handler processes a message unit; the ITP NLU Module processes a sentence and builds a Cognitive Model of the message; and the MUC3 Template Reasoning Module processes a segment of discourse. MUC 3