The clarity-brevity trade-off in generating referring expressions

Abstract

Existing algorithms for the Generation of Referring Expressions (GRE) aim at generating descriptions that allow a hearer to identify its intended referent uniquely; the length of the expression is also considered, usually as a secondary issue. We explore the possibility of making the trade-off between these two factors more explicit, via a general cost function which scores these two aspects separately. We sketch some more complex phenomena which might be amenable to this treatment. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics.