Event

Referring Expression Generation: Should I Use a Name or a Pronoun?

Benoit Favre and Bernd Bohnet

ICSI

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
12:30

Text generation systems have to turn content from various sources involving real world entities in a sequence of fluent sentences. Using the full name of an entity every time it is referred to is rather unnatural and redundant. Humans alternate the use full names, short names and pronouns and (often) manage to keep the communication efficient. In this talk, we describe referring expression generation within the task of Natural Language Generation and we will discuss our participation to the GREC challenge which consists in generating referential expressions for entities described in Wikipedia, such as people, mountains, cities, countries or rivers. Our approach predicts attributes of the text instead of the text itself (such as "pronoun" instead of "he") which is implemented as sequence classification using Conditional Random Fields.