A REVIEW OF THE LINGUISTIC RESEARCH ON DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS

Abstract

We present in this paper a review on the linguisticliterature on the types of uses of definite descriptions (noun phraseswith the definite article the). Definite descriptions have beenstudied extensively by linguists, philosophers, psychologists, andcomputational linguists. The theories discussed in this paper help usto understand the problem of interpreting definite descriptions. Welook at research studying the various ways in which definitedescriptions relate to their antecedents and/or to the context. Wecompare terms referring to the various types of uses of definitedescriptions by presenting tables that relate examples of definitedescription use to different terminology, according to differentauthors.This review is mainly motivated by the necessity ofunderstanding the role of definite descriptions for co-referenceprocessing. Co-reference processing has been one main issue innatural language processing, artificial intelligence andcomputational linguists. It has direct applications in the field ofinformation extraction. Much work has been done in anaphoraresolution, and usually definite descriptions are considered as aspecial case of anaphora and their treatment is included in generalframeworks that mainly deal with pronouns. The work presentedhere aims to provide a concise material reviewing several works onthe use of definite descriptions revealing the complexity of theproblem, which we believe to deserve a particular treatment of itsown.