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Generating natural language descriptions using speaker-dependent information†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

THIAGO C. FERREIRA  and
IVANDRÉ PARABONI
THIAGO C. FERREIRA
Affiliation:
Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication, Tilburg UniversityP.O. Box 90135, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands e-mail: tcastrof@tilburguniversity.edu
IVANDRÉ PARABONI
Affiliation:
School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of São PauloAv. Arlindo Bettio, 1000 - São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: ivandre@usp.br
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Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of human variation in natural language referring expression generation. We introduce a model of content selection that takes speaker-dependent information into account to produce descriptions that closely resemble those produced by each individual, as seen in a number of reference corpora. Results show that our speaker-dependent referring expression generation model outperforms alternatives that do not take human variation into account, or which do so less extensively, and suggest that the use of machine-learning methods may be an ideal approach to mimic complex referential behaviour.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 23 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 813 - 834
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

†

This work has been supported by CAPES and FAPESP. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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