1. Kees van Deemter Computing Science University of Aberdeen
Generation of Referring Expressions: the State of the Art LOT Winter School, Tilburg 2008
Kees van Deemter
Computing Science
University of Aberdeen

2. Reference to sets: taking stock

3. Reference to sets: taking stock
Remarkably little computational or psycholinguistic work has been done on reference to sets.
This stands in contrast to a significant amount of formal semantics work, mostly focussing on collectivity (e.g., Scha 1981, Link 1983) and intensionality (Landman 1989).
Problems with computational complexity are even greater than with reference to single objects (but only if brevity is an issue). – Most people agree that getting “the right” descriptions is a more important problem.

4. Reference to sets: taking stock
3. Gardent (2002, ACL) criticised Van Deemter (2002) for producing overly elaborate descriptions.
This can be partly prevented by logical optimisation. [Project: try this, for example using Quine/McCluskey optimisation.]
Gardent’s own proposal re-instates Full Brevity. Constraint satisfaction techniques are used to combine declarative problem statement with (relatively!) fast search.
Horacek (2004) has proposed alternative techniques for weeding out infelicitous descriptions. Also van Deemter & Krahmer 2007, and especially Gatt 2007 (PhD thesis).

5. Reference to sets: taking stock
Evaluation of algorithms that refer to sets lags behind evaluation in GRE more generally.
TUNA evaluation (Van der Sluis et al 2007, Gatt et al 2007) limited this to references to sets of 2. All algoritms performed badly.
STEC invited people to submit algorithms that refer to sets, but none was received.

6. Reference to sets: taking stock
5. Gatt’s work has put the spotlight on intra-NP coherence, e.g.
“the Greek and the Italian” is better than
“the Greek and the cook”
Gatt’s research method is exemplary, and coherence might prove to be an important aspect of text quality more generally (also outside GRE). E.g.,
Coherence between different NPs: “The Greek ....; The Italian ...”
Coherence between all the words in a text. For example, it seems plausible that all the words should have similar degrees of formality

7. Reference to sets: taking stock
6. Collective reference. Stone (2000) proposes a (constraint-based) GRE algorithm that produces references like “The parallel lines at the top of the screen”