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<Paper uid="C88-2126">
  <Title>Anaphorie Reference to Events and Actions: A Representation and its Advantages</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="602" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> When people speak or Write, they refer to things, objects, events, actions, facts or states that they (or other people) referred to before. They use certain words to &amp;quot;refer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;point&amp;quot; to those things: previously mentioned. Such context-dependent reference is called, anaphora, and the words used to &amp;quot;refer&amp;quot; are called anaphors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Some examples of anaphors include pronouns such as he, she, it' and noun phrases that contain this; that, these and those. Consider for example the following pair of sentences:  (1) U: I want to move a 0lock of text as a unit. How do I do it?  The it in the second sentence is the anaphor which points back to the action that the user wants to perform, described in the first sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In our communications, we benefit from the use of anaphoric forms which make our interactions more coherent and intelligible. If we were forced to describe everything explicitly, our discourse would become very complex, long and time-consuming. Moreover it could become confusing and lead to potential misunderstandings. Such is the case in the following example which is similar to example (1) but in which a pronoun is not used in the second sentence: (2) U: I want to move a block of text as a unit. How do I move a block of text as a unit? We as listeners may find these-sentences very odd and lacking coherence. We may wonder about the need to repeat the description which has already been introduced. If the speaker fails to use the pronoun, 'the listener may believe that he is meant to conclude something special from this unnatural usage. This conclusion may be unwarranted.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The work we present here describes the process of dealing with anaphoric language when the reference is to events and actions. It considers two issues: (i) what aspects of the discourse give evidence of the events and the a~tions the speaker is talking about, and (ii) how actions and events are represented in the discourse in order to be able to refer to them anaphoricaUy. The overall goal is to make natural-language communication between human beings and machines more robust and coherent. This can be done by providing computer systems with the ability to adequately generate  and interpret text which includes anaphoric references to events and actions in a similar way to how human beings do it. To illustrate the problem that we are dealing with, we use some examples taken from a set of natural language transcripts about the EMACS text editor. The users were given a task to perform using EMACS and at the same time they were able to ask an expert about the various things they could do in EMACS. The goal of the interaction was for the users to learn how to use the EMACS editting system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In the next section we will describe how we view discourse models along with the representation of entities which form part of them. In section 3 we describe a representation of those entities based on the language used. We propose a generalization of that representation which allows us to have access to the different entities characterized by the text. In section 4 we relate the proposed representation with the particular pronouns used to refer to events, based on some data analysis. We conclude by giving a brief summary of what the advantages of the proposed representation are.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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