Quantification and Cognitive Constraints in Natural Language Understanding

Quantification in natural language is an important phenomena as it relates to scoping, reference resolution, and, more importantly, to inference. In this paper we argue that the reasoning involved in quantifier scoping and reference resolution is highly dependent on the linguistic context as well as time and memory constraints. Time and memory constraints are not only physical realities that an intelligent agent must cope with, but, as we shall argue, they play an important role in the inferencing process that underlies the task of language understanding.

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