The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative
Name
Hervás, Finlayson (2010) The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative.pdf
Description
Final published version.
Size
456.35 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
14200842a6a41ce82b09a0ef4cf7c0c8
Author(s) •
Hervaś, Raquel
Finlayson, Mark Alan
Date Issued
July 11, 2010
Publisher
© Association for Computational Linguistics
Citation
Hervás, R., & Finlayson, M. A. (2010). The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative. Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers, 49–54.
Version
Final published version.
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 flu- ent, 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 de- vote more attention to understanding how to generate descriptive, and not just distinctive, referring expressions.
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