A Computational Treatment of Anaphora and Its Algorithmic Implementation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a framework capable of dealing with anaphora and ellipsis which is both general and algorithmic. This generality is ensured by the compination of two general ideas. First, we use a dynamic semantics which reperent effects using a monad structure. Second we treat scopes flexibly, extending them as needed. We additionally implement this framework as an algorithm which translates abstract syntax to logical formulas. We argue that this framework can provide a unified account of a large number of anaphoric phenomena. Specifically, we show its effectiveness in dealing with pronominal and VP-anaphora, strict and lazy pronouns, lazy identity, bound variable anaphora, e-type pronouns, and cataphora. This means that in particular we can handle complex cases like Bach–Peters sentences, which require an account dealing simultaneously with several phenomena. We use Haskell as a meta-language to present the theory, which also consitutes an implementation of all the phenomena discussed in the paper. To demonstrate coverage, we propose a test suite that can be used to evaluate computational approaches to anaphora.

FraCaS: Temporal Analysis

“…Its role is essentially to support (non-temporal) anaphora, using a monadic-based dynamic semantics, generally following the state of the art in this matter (Unger, 2011;Charlow, 2015Charlow, , 2017. Our particular implementation does not handle every case Bernardy et al (2020); Bernardy and Chatzikyriakidis (2019) but non-temporal anaphoroi in the testsuite are generally resolved as they should be: on the whole accuracy is not affected significantly by issues in this subsystem.…”