Generating Referring Expressions: Making Referents Easy to Identify

Abstract

It is often desirable that referring expressions be chosen in such a way that their referents are easy to identify. This article focuses on referring expressions in hierarchically structured domains, exploring the hypothesis that referring expressions can be improved by including logically redundant information in them if this leads to a significant reduction in the amount of search that is needed to identify the referent. Generation algorithms are presented that implement this idea by including logically redundant information into the generated expression, in certain well-circumscribed situations. To test our hypotheses, and to assess the performance of our algorithms, two controlled experiments with human subjects were conducted. The first experiment confirms that human judges have a preference for logically redundant expressions in the cases where our model predicts this to be the case. The second experiment suggests that readers benefit from the kind of logical redundancy that our algorithms produce, as measured in terms of the effort needed to identify the referent of the expression.

Cartographic Redundancy in Reducing Change Blindness in Detecting Extreme Values in Spatio-Temporal Maps

“…Redundancy has been used in cartographic research before, especially for generation of route directions [54,55]. In order to test the effect of redundancy on the perception of changes on the animated map, we designed three additional maps.…”

Models and empirical data for the production of referring expressions

“…For example, Paraboni, van Deemter, and Masthoff (2007) found that overspecification increases in spatially complex domains, while Arts (2004) for an apartment, a speaker may refer to an object currently in focus using ostensibly redundant properties in order to confirm that she has understood and accepted her partner's previous utterance.…”

“…Paraboni and van Deemter (2013) focus on reference in spatial and hierarchical domains (e.g. a document divided into sections and subsections), where overspecification has been found to facilitate identification of a referent to a degree that is not predicted by standard reg algorithms (Paraboni et al, 2007). Their new findings, which are incorporated in a new algorithm, suggest that overspecification plays a facilitative role for a listener under conditions where finding a path through a space may be problematic.…”

7. Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication

“…This is supported by evidence from Mangold and Pobel (1988), who found that overspecification shortened identification time if the redundant feature was better perceptible than the discriminating feature. The utility (and thus incidence) of this type of overinformativeness may be increased when contexts are complex or otherwise demanding (Paraboni et al 2007), and the cooperative speaker may be motivated to reduce the search space Brought to you by | De Gruyter / TCS Authenticated Download Date | 5/9/16 9:58 PM for the hearer. Arts (2004Arts ( , 2011 found that certain types of overspecification almost consistently led to accelerated resolution, especially attributes concerning the location of an object.…”

“…Computational linguistic research has documented high rates of overinforming in human speech (Dale & Reiter 1995;Viethen & Dale 2006;Paraboni et al 2007;van der Sluis & Krahmer 2007;). This dialogue between psycholinguistics and computational linguists has been mutually beneficial: 1 how speakers choose the content and form of their REs is not only of interest to psycholinguists and philosophers of language, it is a pervasive challenge for natural language generation systems.…”