Automatic Classification of Communicative Functions of Definiteness

Definiteness expresses a constellation of semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties—the communicative functions—of an NP. We present a supervised classifier for English NPs that uses lexical, morphological, and syntactic features to predict an NP’s communicative function in terms of a language-universal classification scheme. Our classifiers establish strong baselines for future work in this neglected area of computational semantic analysis. In addition, analysis of the features and learned parameters in the model provides insight into the grammaticalization of definiteness in English, not all of which is obvious a priori.