Content determination in the generation of referring expressions

In this paper, we describe a general framework for the generation of referring expressions. Given an intended referent in the domain, domain‐dependent mapping rules build a domain‐independent level of recoverable semantic structure, which encodes the semantic content to be recovered by the hearer; a second set of mapping rules then builds an abstract syntactic structure, which is unified with a grammar and lexicon to produce a surface noun phrase. Within this framework, (0 we present a detailed description of the algorithms required to build the recoverable semantic structure, and discuss how the problem of infinite recursion can be handled when using relations in descriptions; and (/;') we show how the two levels of representation facilitate the generation of one‐anaphoric noun phrases.