Textual co-reference annotation: a study on definite descriptions

In the linguistic literature many different uses of definite descriptions are acknowledged and explained (Fraurud 1990, Hawkins 1978, Löbner 1985, Prince 1992). These authors give us taxonomies of the different uses of the definite article. Based on these previous works we ran two experiments in annotating definite description uses whose goals were: 1. to observe the distribution of the different uses; 2. to estimate the degree of difficulty involved in the processing of definite descriptions, by learning the relative importance of anaphoric descriptions that are resolved with same head antecedents, and what else is necessary to process definite descriptions in texts; 3. to produce annotated texts to be used in our computational experiments (Vieira and Poesio, 2000).