Attribute-Centric Referring Expression Generation

The premise of the work presented in this chapter is that much of the existing work on the generation of referring expressions has focused on aspects of the problem that appear to be somewhat artificial when we look more closely at human-produced referring expressions. In particular, we believe that an overemphasis on the extent to which each property in a description performs a discriminatory function has blinded us to alternative approaches to referring expression generation that might be better-placed to provide an explanation of the variety we find in human-produced referring expressions. On the basis of an analysis of a collection of such data, we propose an alternative view of the process of referring expression generation which we believe is more intuitively plausible, is a better match for the observed data, and opens the door to more sophisticated algorithms that are freed of the constraints adopted in the literature so far.