Referredto

Referredto is a term used primarily in linguistics, natural language processing, and data annotation to denote the entity to which a referring expression points. In discourse, pronouns, definite descriptions, and other mentions have referents or referents-to-be identified; the referredto relation is one way some annotation schemes formalize the link between a referring expression and its intended referent.

In coreference and anaphora analysis, the concept of a referredto relation helps map linguistic units to their antecedents or to external entities. Annotators may record which entity a given mention refers to, enabling downstream tasks such as information extraction, question answering, and summarization. The exact labeling and granularity of referredto can vary by scheme, and some frameworks use alternative terms like antecedent, referent, or target. In many practical applications, referredto is treated as a binary relation from a mention to its referent, which can be a person, object, place, or abstract entity.

Beyond linguistic research, referredto appears in data and knowledge representation, where references between objects are captured in schemas, graphs, or databases. It may be implemented as a field, property, or predicate indicating the target of a reference. In such contexts, the term is often case-sensitive and must be distinguished from similarly named fields that carry metadata about the reference rather than its content.

Challenges include ambiguity, non-referential expressions (such as expletives), and cross-linguistic variation in how referring expressions are encoded. Related concepts include referent, antecedent, deictic expression, and coreference.