Interpreting Vague And Ambiguous Referring Expressions By Dynamically Binding To Properties Of The Context Set

Referring expressions with vague and ambiguous modifiers, such as "a quick visit" and "the big meeting," are difficult for computers to interpret because their words' meanings are in part defined by context, which changes throughout the course of an interpretation. In this paper, we present an approach to interpreting context-dependent referring expressions that uses dynamic binding. During the incremental interpretation of a referring expression, a word's meaning can be defined in part by properties from the current candidate referents-its denotation up to the previous word for the tentative interpretation.