Classification-based referring expression generation

Abstract

This paper presents a study in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG), focusing on the computational task of referring expression generation (REG). We describe a standard REG implementation based on the well-known Dale & Reiter Incremental algorithm, and a classification-based approach that combines the output of several support vector machines (SVMs) to generate definite descriptions from two publicly available corpora. Preliminary results suggest that the SVM approach generally outperforms incremental generation, which paves the way to further research on machine learning methods applied to the task. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.