The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative
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 fun...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
© Association for Computational Linguistics
2022
|
| Online Access: | https://aclanthology.org/P10-2010 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141720 |
| _version_ | 1811073690943619072 |
|---|---|
| author | Hervaś, Raquel Finlayson, Mark Alan |
| author_facet | Hervaś, Raquel Finlayson, Mark Alan |
| author_sort | Hervaś, Raquel |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:37:02Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/141720 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:37:02Z |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| publisher | © Association for Computational Linguistics |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1417202022-04-07T03:36:27Z The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative Hervaś, Raquel Finlayson, Mark Alan 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. This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Grant No. N00014-09-1-0597. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations therein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research. 2022-04-06T17:21:36Z 2022-04-06T17:21:36Z 2010-07-11 Article https://aclanthology.org/P10-2010 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141720 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. en_US Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ application/pdf © Association for Computational Linguistics |
| spellingShingle | Hervaś, Raquel Finlayson, Mark Alan The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title | The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title_full | The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title_fullStr | The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title_full_unstemmed | The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title_short | The prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| title_sort | prevalence of descriptive referring expressions in news and narrative |
| url | https://aclanthology.org/P10-2010 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141720 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT hervasraquel theprevalenceofdescriptivereferringexpressionsinnewsandnarrative AT finlaysonmarkalan theprevalenceofdescriptivereferringexpressionsinnewsandnarrative AT hervasraquel prevalenceofdescriptivereferringexpressionsinnewsandnarrative AT finlaysonmarkalan prevalenceofdescriptivereferringexpressionsinnewsandnarrative |