Referring Expression Generation as a Search Problem
Bernd Bohnet, Robert Dale · 2004
One of the most widely explored issues in natural language generation is the generation of referring expressions (gre): given an entity we want to refer to, how do we work out the content of a referring expression that uniquely identifies the intended referent? Over the last 15 years, a number of authors have proposed a wide range of algorithms for addressing di#erent aspects of this problem, but the di#erent approaches taken have made it very di#cult to compare and contrast the algorithms provided in any meaningful way. In this paper, we propose a characterisation of the problem of referring expression generation as a search problem; this allows us to recast existing algorithms in a way that makes their similarities and di#erences clear.