[Attempto] Warnings about noun phrases and anaphora in relative sentences

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 20 Dec 2010, at 23:23, Kaarel Kaljurand wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 23:24, Joshua TAYLOR <tayloj at cs.rpi.edu> wrote:
>> One of the examples from the 6.6 DRS Report is
>> 
>> "Every card the code of which is correct is valid."
>> 
>> The webservice parses this and produces the DRS described by the
>> report, but also produces a warning:
>> 
>> "The definite noun phrase 'the code' does not have an antecedent and
>> thus is not interpreted as anaphoric reference, but as a new
>> indefinite noun phrase."
>> "If the definite noun phrase 'the code' should be an anaphoric
>> reference then you must introduce an appropriate antecedent."
>> 
>> Is this warning appropriate for this case?
> 
> I believe it's not appropriate for the reason that the above sentence
> should be parsed in the same way as "Every card _a_ code of which is
> correct is valid." no matter what the preceding context is, and one
> cannot actually introduce an appropriate antecedent. Thus advising the
> user to do so is a bug.

English uses definite determiners to represent definite descriptions like "the king of France" or "the code of a card". ACE does not know definite descriptions and interprets the definite determiner as an indefinite determiner. (This was decided after a lengthy discussion.) 

Joshua's example from the DRS report is one of these cases. Note that the simple sentence

 John arises in the morning.

produces the same warning.

Considering that APE generates just a warning and produces the expected DRS I would not call this a bug.


   --- nef