Syntactic disambiguation using presupposition resolution

If a sentence is ambiguous, it often happens that the correct reading is the one which can most easily be incorporated into the discourse context. In this paper we present a simple method for implementing this intuition using the mechanism of presupposition resolution. The basic idea is that we can choose between the alternative readings of an ambiguous sentence by picking the reading which has the greatest number of satistified presuppositions. We present two uses of the disambiguation algorithm in our bilingual human-machine dialogue system.