Describing Sets with Covers and Sets of Ordinary Assignments

A range of research has explored the problem of generating referring expressions that uniquely identify a single entity from the shared context. But what about expressions that identify sets of entities? In this paper, I adapt a state-of-the-art semantics for plural descriptions—using covers to abstract collective and distributive readings and using sets of assignments to represent dependencies among references—to describe a search problem for set-identifying expressions that largely avoids the computational explosions inherent in computing or searching over the power set representation of salient collections.