Using Logic in the Generation of Referring Expressions

CARLOS ARECES; SANTIAGO FIGUEIRA; DANIEL GORÍN

LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Springer

Año: 2011 vol. 6736 p. 17 - 32

0302-9743

The problem of generating referring expressions (GRE) is an important task in natural language generation. In this paper, we advocate for the use of logical languages in the output of the content determination phase (i.e., when the relevant features of the object to be referred are selected). Many different logics can be used for this and we argue that, for a particular application, the actual choice shall constitute a compromise between expressive power (how many objects can be distinguished), computational complexity (how difficult it is to determine the content) and realizability (how often will the selected content be realized to an idiomatic expression). We show that well-known results from the area of computational logic can then be transferred to GRE. Moreover, our approach is orthogonal to previous proposals and we illustrate this by generalizing well-known content-determination algorithms to make them parametric on the logic employed.