The use of spatial relations in referring expression generation

Jette Viethen*, Robert Dale

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

80 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There is a prevailing assumption in the literature on referring expression generation that relations are used in descriptions only 'as a last resort', typically on the basis that including the second entity in the relation introduces an additional cognitive load for either speaker or hearer. In this paper, we describe an experiemt that attempts to test this assumption; we determine that, even in simple scenes where the use of relations is not strictly required in order to identify an entity, relations are in fact often used. We draw some conclusions as to what this means for the development of algorithms for the generation of referring expressions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication5th International Natural Language Generation Conference, Proceedings of the Conference, INLG 2008
Place of PublicationSydney
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages59-67
Number of pages9
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Event5th International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG 2008 - Salt Fork, OH, United States
Duration: 12 Jun 200814 Jun 2008

Other

Other5th International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG 2008
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Fork, OH
Period12/06/0814/06/08

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