Rule-based vs. probabilistic surface realisation of definite description
Francis Marques V. dos Santos, Daniel Bastos Pereira, Ivandré Paraboni · 2008
We describe the evaluation work of two standard approaches to the surface realisation of definite descriptions as Portuguese text. Taking as an input a non-linguistic representation of the description to be generated, a rule-based approach makes use of grammar constraints to compute the appropriate surface string, whereas a competing probabilistic model applies n-gram statistics to the same task. The results of both systems are compared against a corpus of human-produced descriptions and their advantages are discussed.