Belz, Anja and Varges, Sebastian (2007) Generation of repeated references to discourse entities In: Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG'07), 17-20 Jun 2007, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany.
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Generation of Referring Expressions is a thriving subfield of Natural Language Generation which has traditionally focused on the task of selecting a set of attributes that unambiguously identify a given referent. In this paper, we address the complementary problem of generating repeated, potentially different referential expressions that refer to the same entity in the context of a piece of discourse longer than a sentence. We describe a corpus of short encyclopaedic texts we have compiled and annotated for reference to the main subject of the text, and report results for our experiments in which we set human subjects and automatic methods the task of selecting a referential expression from a wide range of choices in a full-text context. We find that our human subjects agree on choice of expression to a considerable degree, with three identical expressions selected in 50% of cases. We tested automatic selection strategies based on most frequent choice heuristics, involving different combinations of information about syntactic MSR type and domain type. We find that more information generally produces better results, achieving a best overall test set accuracy of 53.9% when both syntactic MSR type and domain type are known.
|Item Type:||Contribution to conference proceedings in the public domain ( Full Paper)|
|Uncontrolled Keywords:||Natural language generation; Referring expressions|
|Subjects:||Q000 Languages and Literature - Linguistics and related subjects > Q100 Linguistics|
|Faculties:||Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics > Natural Language Technology|
|Date Deposited:||18 Nov 2007|
|Last Modified:||25 Feb 2015 14:47|
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