An Empirically-based System for Processing Definite Descriptions

We present an implemented system for processing definite descriptions in arbitrary domains. The design of the system is based on the results of a corpus analysis previously reported, which highlighted the prevalence of discourse-new descriptions in newspaper corpora. The annotated corpus was used to extensively evaluate the proposed techniques for matching definite descriptions with their antecedents, discourse segmentation, recognizing discourse-new descriptions, and suggesting anchors for bridging descriptions.