Referring Expression Generation as a Search Problem

One of the most widely explored issues in natural language generation is the generation of referring expressions (gre): given an entity we want to refer to, how do we work out the content of a referring expression that uniquely identifies the intended referent? Over the last 15 years, a number of authors have proposed a wide range of algorithms for addressing different aspects of this problem, but the different approaches taken have made it very difficult to compare and contrast the algorithms provided in any meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a characterisation of the problem of referring expression generation as a search problem; this allows us to recast existing algorithms in a way that makes their similarities and differences clear.

[1]  Allen Newell,et al.  GPS, a program that simulates human thought , 1995 .

[2]  Steven Bird,et al.  In Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop , 2004 .

[3]  Robert Dale,et al.  Computational Interpretations of the Gricean Maxims in the Generation of Referring Expressions , 1995, Cogn. Sci..

[4]  Robert Dale,et al.  ‘One’-anaphora and the case for discourse-driven referring expression generation , 2003, ALTA.

[5]  Helmut Horacek,et al.  An Algorithm for Generating Referential Descriptions with Flexible Interfaces , 1997, ACL.

[6]  Robert Dale,et al.  A Fast Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions , 1992, COLING.

[7]  John A. Bateman,et al.  Using aggregation for selecting content when generating referring expressions , 1999, ACL.

[8]  Robert Dale,et al.  Generating Referring Expressions Involving Relations , 1991, EACL.

[9]  Kees van Deemter.  Generating Referring Expressions: Boolean Extensions of the Incremental Algorithm , 2002, CL.

[10]  Peter Norvig,et al.  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , 1995 .

[11]  Emiel Krahmer,et al.  Efficient context-sensitive generation of referring expressions , 2002 .

[12]  Douglas Edmund Appelt,et al.  Planning natural language utterances to satisfy multiple goals , 1981 .

[13]  Emiel Krahmer,et al.  Graph-Based Generation of Referring Expressions , 2003, CL.

[14]  Robert Dale,et al.  Cooking Up Referring Expressions , 1989, ACL.

[15]  Matthew Stone,et al.  On identifying sets , 2000, INLG.

[16]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Understanding natural language , 1974 .