tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "The Prevalence of Descriptive Referring Expressions in News and Narrative"

Generating referring expressions is a key step in Natural Language Generation. Researchers have focused almost exclusively on generating distinctive referring expressions, that is, referring expressions that uniquely identify their intended referent. While undoubtedly one of their most important functions, referring expressions can be more than distinctive. In particular, descriptive referring expressions – those that provide additional information not required for distinction – are critical to fluent, efficient, well-written text. . | The Prevalence of Descriptive Referring Expressions in News and Narrative Raquel Hervas Departamento de Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid 28040 Spain raquelhb@ Abstract Generating referring expressions is a key step in Natural Language Generation. Researchers have focused almost exclusively on generating distinctive referring expressions that is referring expressions that uniquely identify their intended referent. While undoubtedly one of their most important functions referring expressions can be more than distinctive. In particular descriptive referring expressions - those that provide additional information not required for distinction - are critical to fluent efficient well-written text. We present a corpus analysis in which approximately one-fifth of 7 207 referring expressions in 24 422 words of news and narrative are descriptive. These data show that if we are ever to fully master natural language generation especially for the genres of news and narrative researchers will need to devote more attention to understanding how to generate descriptive and not just distinctive referring expressions. 1 A Distinctive Focus Generating referring expressions is a key step in Natural Language Generation NLG . From early treatments in seminal papers by Appelt 1985 and Reiter and Dale 1992 to the recent set of Referring Expression Generation REG Challenges Gatt et al. 2009 through different corpora available for the community Eugenio et al. 1998 van Deemter et al. 2006 Viethen and Dale 2008 generating referring expressions has become one of the most studied areas of NLG. Researchers studying this area have almost without exception focused exclusively on how to generate distinctive referring expressions that is referring expressions that unambiguously iden- Mark Alan Finlayson Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge MA 02139 USA markaf@ .