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<Paper uid="C86-1081">
  <Title>A LOGICAL FORMALISM FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF DETERMINERS f</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Ambiguity of determiners is one of the most striking phenomena of natural language; what is strange is the case with ~hich humans use them: it seems that the molteplicity of interpretations of a ncun phrase including a determiner is not explicitly perceived by human users of rmtural language \[Hobbs 1983\]. The approach we chose tries to model this behavier: each determiner has a charac ~ teristic semantic interpretation, which is different from that of ot\]qer determiners and which can be furtherly specified an the basis of the information contents gathered from the overall ean ~ text and frfxn the remsining part of the sentence. If such an information contents is rot sufficient, then the meaning of the determiner remains ambiguous. What is of paramount i~rtance is that any determiner has a &amp;quot;single&amp;quot; meaning, that can be furtherly specified by the context.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Of course, we need to express the se~sntics of determiners by means of a suitable representation. The one that we propose seems to be intuitively acceptable, formally precise and suitable for a cm~positional analysis of natural language that, even if questien able in some particular cases, is still one of the approaches that guarantee the most reasonable degree of generality in semantic interpretation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It is obvious that the representation of a sentence in such a fon~sliem may contain ambiguities; therefore a further step is needed in order to obtain an unambigtmus deep specification of its meaning. Contrarily to the intermediate logical formalism we are going to discuss, this firml specification will rot be given in declarative form, but in terms of operations on an underlying knowledge base.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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