The processing of referring expressions within a semantic network
John R. Anderson · 1978
Frege (1892) is credited with emphasizing the distinction between sense and reference.His famous example involved the mornin$ star and the evenin$ star.Despite the fact that they both refer to the same object (i.e., Venus), they have different senses as witnessed by the fact that sentence (i) is not synonymous with sentence (2):(i) The morning star is the morning star.(2) The morning star is the evening star.This philosophical issue has similarities to an issue that is of importance to understanding natural language processing: How do subjects process referring expressions to extract internal representations (a) of their meaning and (b) of their referents in the external world.The example sentence that we will be returning to in this paper is:(3) The first president of the United States was a bad husband.It is clear that in understanding this sentence we both process the subject as a description, and identify this as referring to George Washington.This paper will try to explain how this comes about.As I believe that all interesting questions about representation come down to questions about memory, I will approach this question from a human memory perspective.