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<Paper uid="P97-1027">
  <Title>An Algorithm For Generating Referential Descriptions With Flexible Interfaces</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Generating referential descriptions I requires selecting a set of descriptors according to criteria which reflect humans preferences and verbalizing these descriptors while meeting natural language constraints. Over the last decade, (Dale, 1989, Dale, Haddock, 1991, Reiter, 1990b, Dale, Reiter, 1995), and others 2 have contributed to this issue The term 'referential description' is due to Donellan (Donellan, 1966). This notion signifies a referring expression that serves the purpose of letting the hearer identify a particular object out of a set of objects assumed to be in the current focus of attention.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The approach undertaken by Appelt and Kronfeld (Appelt, 1985a, Appelt, 1985b, Kronfeld, 1986, Appelt, Kronfeld, 1987) is very elaborate but it suffers from very limited coverage, missing assessments of the relative benefit of alternatives, and notorious inefficiency. null (see the systems NAOS (Novak, 1988), EPICURE (Dale, 1988), FN (Reiter, 1990a), and IDAS (Reiter, Dale, 1992)). Nevertheless, these approaches still suffer from some crucial deficits, including limited coverage (see (Horacek, 1995, Horacek, 1996) for an improved algorithm), and too strong assumptions about adjacent processing components, namely: * the instant availability of all descriptors for an object to be described, * the adequate expressibility of a chosen set of descriptors in terms of lexical items.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Motivated by the resulting deficits, we develop a new algorithm that does not rely on these assumptions. It (1) allows for a widely unconstrained, incremental, and goal-driven selection of descriptors, (2) integrates linguistic constraints to ensure the expressibility of the chosen descriptors, and (3) provides means to control the appearance of the created referring expression.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper is organized as follows. After having introduced some basic terminology, we elaborate interface deficits of existing algorithms, form which we derive desiderata for an improved algorithm. Then we describe concepts to meet these desiderata, and we illustrate their operationalization in a schematic and in a detailed version. Finally, we demonstrate the increased functionality of the new algorithm, and we evaluate the achievements.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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