For over 30 years, reference resolution, the process of determining what a noun phrase including a pronoun refers to in written and spoken language, has been an important and on-going area of research. Most existing pronominal reference resolution algorithms and systems are designed to use syntactic information and surface features (e.g. number…

Ways of making the natural language of unsophisticated computer users meaningful to the computer are discussed. The discussion is set within the context of the Rapidly Extensible Language (REL) System, a question answering system with underlying relational data bases. Major topics covered include individuals and predicates, the problem of verbs,…