[Ltg] LTG Seminar [Jette Viethen 07-05-28, E6A 357, 11am]

[Marc Tilbrook]

----
 LTG Seminar
  - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Seminars.html

  Monday, 28th May, 2007, 11am
  Macquarie University, E6A, Room 357
 ----

Title: Capturing Acceptable Variation in Distinguishing Descriptions - and
where am I going from here?
Speaker: Jette Viethen

I will first do a dry run of the talk I'll be giving at ENLG next month
which is titled "Capturing Acceptable Variation in Distinguishing
Descriptions". Hoping that this will only take about 30 minutes, I will then
talk about the bigger picture of my PhD. I am now at the point where I have
to pin down more or less exactly what the main theme of my thesis will be. A
few options are on the table, including among others "Acceptability in
Referring Expression Generation",  "Domain-Specificity", "Generation of
Referring Expressions Containing Relations", "Evaluation of Referring
Expression Generation Systems" and combinations of related topics. I'll be
grateful for feedback from the group on the ideas I will be presenting. The
abstract of the ENLG paper reads: "Almost all existing referring expression
generation algorithms aim to find one best referring expression for a given
intended referent. However, human-produced data demonstrates that, for any
given entity, many perfectly acceptable referring expressions exist. At the
same time, it is not the case that all logically possible descriptions are
acceptable; so, if we remove the requirement to produce only one best
solution, how do we avoid generating undesirable descriptions? Our aim in
this paper is to sketch a framework that allows us to capture constraints on
referring expression generation, so that the set of logically possible
descriptions can be reduced to just those that are acceptable."