The Logical Structure of Binding

The Logical Structure of Binding Ant6nio Branco DFKI and Univ. of Lisbon Dep. Inform~itica, Fac. Ci~ncias, Campo Grande, 1700 Lisboa, Portugal Antonio.Branco@di. fc.ul .pt Abstract A log.ical recasting of B.inding Theory is performed as an enhancing step tor the purpose ot its gull and lean declarative implementation. A new insight on sentential anaptioric processes is presented which may suggestively be c%ptured by the slogan binding conclitions are me effect of phase quantification on the universe of discourse referents. Introduction Due to its central role in natural language and its intriguing propert.ies, reference and anap'hor resolution has been a central topic for NLP research. Given the intensive attention devoted to this subject, .it can however be said that sentential anaphor orocessmg has been quite overlooked, when compared io the amount of research effort put in tackling non sentential anaphoric dependencies. This tends to be so because there seems to be a more or less implicit assumption that no substantial difference exists between the two ~cesses 1. ile this may be arguably true for. the heuristics involved in picking out a given antecedent from a list of suitable candidates, a more s.ubtle point asks. itself to be made when we focus on the syntactic conditions which sentential anaohoric relations comply with, but from which non senfential ones are exempt. In theoretical linguistics these grammatical conditions are grouped under the hea.ding of BindingTheory.. In computational linguistics however, tlaoug.n there have been a few papers directly concerned with me implementation of this theory, mainstream research tends t 9 disregard its conceptual, grammatical or practical modularity. When it comes to define me algorithm. .for.setting up the list of suitable candidates from which the antecedent should be chosen, binding conditions, holding just at the sentential level, are most otten put on a par with any other kind of conditions, morphological, semantic, pragmatic, etc.~ which hold for anaptioric relations at both sentential and non sentential level. The interesting p.oint to be made in this connection is at, it the modularity ot grammatical knowledge is to be ensured in a sound reference resolution system, more attention should be paid to previous attempts of implementing, Binding Theory.. It would then become ewdent that mis theory, in its current formulation, appears, as ,a , piece of formalised grammatical KnowJe~age wnicn nowever escapes a full and lean declarative implementation. In fact, implementation efforts concerning Binding Theory 2 bring to light what tend to be eE!ipsed by. mainstream clean theoretical formulations ot it. Behind t.he apparent declarative aspect of its definition under the form ot a set of binding principles(plus definitions of associated concepts, e.g. o-command, o-bound, local IAs entry points into bibliography vd References in Grosz etal. (95) and Botley et al. (96). -'Vd. Chomsky(81 ), Correa(88), lngria et al (89), Fong (90), Giorgi et al. (90), Pianesi (91). domain, etc.), there is a set of procedures which turn out to be an essential p.art ot the theory: after parsing being completed, (it in~lexation: assignln.dices to NPs; (ii) filtering: store the …

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