Referententity

Referententity is a term used to describe the entity that a referential expression designates within a given context. It denotes the object, person, place, or abstract concept that a term or symbol points to, distinguishing the actual referent from the linguistic form or sense in which it is presented. While not a standard term in most linguistic or philosophical literatures, referententity is sometimes used to emphasize the ontological status of the target as an entity in a domain such as a knowledge graph, ontology, or discourse model.

In linguistics and philosophy of language, referententity sits at the intersection of referents and referential expressions. It highlights the relationship between linguistic form (the word or phrase) and the real-world or domain-specific object it stands for. In practical applications like natural language processing and the semantic web, referententity can be represented by identifiers such as URIs, enabling precise linking and disambiguation across texts and datasets.

Examples illustrate the concept: the referententity of "Marie Curie" is the historical person Marie Skłodowska Curie; the referententity of "the capital of France" is the city Paris; the pronoun "it" refers to a previously established referententity in the discourse. Entity linking and co-reference resolution aim to identify and connect referententities across sentences and documents.

Limitations include context-dependence, polysemy, and ambiguity, which can complicate mapping expressions to their correct referententities. Discourse context, ontologies, and structured knowledge representations are common tools for clarifying and anchoring these referents in computational systems.