  We present the results of a study of definite descriptions use in written
texts aimed at assessing the feasibility of annotating corpora with information
about definite description interpretation. We ran two experiments, in which
subjects were asked to classify the uses of definite descriptions in a corpus
of 33 newspaper articles, containing a total of 1412 definite descriptions. We
measured the agreement among annotators about the classes assigned to definite
descriptions, as well as the agreement about the antecedent assigned to those
definites that the annotators classified as being related to an antecedent in
the text. The most interesting result of this study from a corpus annotation
perspective was the rather low agreement (K=0.63) that we obtained using
versions of Hawkins' and Prince's classification schemes; better results
(K=0.76) were obtained using the simplified scheme proposed by Fraurud that
includes only two classes, first-mention and subsequent-mention. The agreement
about antecedents was also not complete. These findings raise questions
concerning the strategy of evaluating systems for definite description
interpretation by comparing their results with a standardized annotation. From
a linguistic point of view, the most interesting observations were the great
number of discourse-new definites in our corpus (in one of our experiments,
about 50% of the definites in the collection were classified as discourse-new,
30% as anaphoric, and 18% as associative/bridging) and the presence of
definites which did not seem to require a complete disambiguation.
