[wauter]

Actually I don't really get why anaphora are considered so hard:

the difference between We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were hungry.

and

  We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were ripe.

is simply to check in what you know about the world. Monkeys are animals, which can be hungry. Bananas are fruits which can be ripe. The third example is ambiguous because both animals and fruits can be 'here'.

Similarly, out of all the meanings of 'bank', there's only one that can be sat on.

Consider me naive, but it shouldn't be too hard to build a program backed by nothing more than an SQL database that can handle these.

And consider me SUPER naive, but that's exactly what I am doing at the moment in my spare time.