Classification-Based Referring Expression Generation

This paper presents a study in the field of Natural Language Generation NLG, focusing on the computational task of referring expression generation REG. We describe a standard REG implementation based on the well-known Dale & Reiter Incremental algorithm, and a classification-based approach that combines the output of several support vector machines SVMs to generate definite descriptions from two publicly available corpora. Preliminary results suggest that the SVM approach generally outperforms incremental generation, which paves the way to further research on machine learning methods applied to the task.