This paper addresses singular definite descriptions interpreted referentially (e.g., “the President of the United States” referring to Ronald Reagan), under the assumption that proper database query systems must have some way of handling these correctly, efficiently, and cooperatively. Current database systems typically fail to capture the uniqueness of such descriptions. The author briefly reviews some treatments of these expressions, chiefly in the philosophical literature, selecting for possible application to the database case Barwise and Perry’s distinction between value-free and value-loaded evaluation of expressions [1]. She illustrates the consequences via examples, showing, for instance, when a more discriminating treatment than the usual value-loading would be helpful.

The author correctly notes that definite reference is a challenging phenomenon for natural language processing. The paper is useful in emphasizing the importance of definite reference, even in such “simple” contexts as database query, and in drawing attention to views put forward outside of computational language processing. But it is very sketchy, and does not offer any exploitable concrete proposals. The text is disfigured by an unusually large number of typographical errors, far more than is consonant with scholarly journal publication.