Formalising and specifying underquantification

This paper argues that all subject noun phrases can be given a quantified formalisation in terms of the intersection between their denotation set and the denotation set of their verbal predicate. The majority of subject noun phrases, however, are only implicitely quantified and the task of retrieving the most plausible quantifier for a given NP is non-trivial. We propose a formalisation which captures the underspecification of the quantifier in subject NPs and we show that this formalisation is widely applicable, including in statements involving kinds. We then present a baseline for a quantification resolution system using syntactic features as basis for classification. Although the syntactic baseline provides a respectable 78% precision, our error analysis shows that obtaining true performance on the task requires information beyond syntax.