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Implementing the Binding and Accommodation Theory for Anaphora Resolution and Presupposition Projection

Paper · 2003 · Johan Bos

Summary

The paper turns Van der Sandt's binding and accommodation theory (BAT) into something a program can execute. BAT treats presupposition triggers (definite articles, possessives, factives, implicative verbs like manage, too) as anaphora that carry their own content. A trigger either finds an antecedent in the discourse, which is binding, or adds its content at a suitable level of the representation, which is accommodation. Bos restates the theory inside DRT so that it can be implemented. This covers the DRS operations it needs (renaming and merging), a representation of presuppositions that allows selective binding and keeps track of free and bound variables, and a precise version of BAT's acceptability constraints. On top of this he gives an efficient resolution algorithm that ranks binding against accommodation by preference. He tests it on a corpus of route instructions. The acceptability checks need real inference, so he hands consistency checking of DRSs to general-purpose first-order theorem provers. The work matters because it connects a formal theory of presupposition to working discourse processing with an actual inference component.

Key points

  • Drawing on Geurts (1999), Van der Sandt (1992) and Van der Sandt and Geurts (1991), the paper casts BAT as an extension of DRT (Kamp and Reyle 1993).
  • The paper addresses three problems:
    • binding, as in "A boxer nearly escaped from his apartment", where the presupposed owner must be the asserted boxer;
    • projection, where "If Mia is married, her husband…" cancels the presupposition but "If Mia dates Vincent…" does not;
    • accommodation, which can add new information or serve as a hearer's repair strategy.
  • Accommodation varies by trigger type. Genitives and factives accommodate easily, while triggers like too usually need a real antecedent.
  • The algorithm was evaluated on a route-instruction corpus collected in the IBL project for instructing personal robots.
  • Consistency checks are delegated to off-the-shelf first-order provers through inference agents in the Open Agent Architecture. Integrating centering-based salience ranking is left as future work.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A presupposition is handled as an anaphor with descriptive content, so one procedure covers both pronoun resolution and presupposition handling: bind if possible, otherwise accommodate. This unifies two modules that are usually kept apart.
  • I2. Candidate resolutions are filtered by acceptability constraints: the result must stay consistent and informative, and must not leave variables free. Readings that break the discourse are rejected rather than merely scored low.
  • I3. Accommodation level and binding are ordered by explicit preference. Binding beats accommodation, and accommodating higher, globally, beats accommodating lower, locally. This gives a deterministic and inspectable ranking instead of an opaque score.
  • I4. Consistency checking is outsourced to general-purpose theorem provers instead of hand-written inference rules, so linguistic resolution gets genuine logical reasoning.
  • I5. Trigger-specific accommodation behaviour (easy for genitives and factives, hard for too) is encoded per lexical item.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): coreference in prag could treat definites, possessives and pronouns as one "resolve-or-accommodate" step, logging which antecedent was chosen or why a new entity was created.
  • I2 (world): before committing an entity or state to the text world, check that it does not contradict earlier facts, and keep the failed alternatives as explainable rejections.
  • I3 (world): choose where a presupposed entity lives (main narrative vs. inside a conditional or a character's belief) by a fixed, traceable preference order.
  • I4 (answer): QA over fables or word problems could call a small prover or model checker to confirm that a candidate answer is consistent with the compiled text world.
  • I5 (frames): annotate trigger words in the lexicon with an accommodation flag, so that an unresolvable too raises a "missing context" signal instead of silently inventing an entity.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of EdinburghEdinburgh · United Kingdom359 works · 77,352 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Coreference resolution · 574 worksImplicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Johan Bos. 2003. Implementing the Binding and Accommodation Theory for Anaphora Resolution and Presupposition Projection. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/089120103322145306

@article{bos2003implementing,
  title = {{Implementing the Binding and Accommodation Theory for Anaphora Resolution and Presupposition Projection}},
  author = {Johan Bos},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.1162/089120103322145306},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120103322145306}
}

References

29 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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