[Ltg] LTG Seminar [Robert Dale 2007-08-27, E6A 357, 10am]

[Marc Tilbrook]

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

  Monday, 27th August, 2007, 10am
  Macquarie University, E6A, Room 357
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  * Please note the earlier start time of 10am.
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Title: The Generation of Referring Expressions:
Where We've Been, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going
Speaker: Robert Dale

This talk is a work-in-progress: I'm giving an invited talk at NLP-KE in
Beijing (last week in August), a seminar at Linkoping University in Sweden
(Sep 6th) and an invited talk at Pacling in Melbourne (Sep 19th), and they
will all be variants of the same talk.  I gave the first version at NUS a
couple of weeks ago, and in the version I give at LTG I hope to have some
interesting things to say about the discourse functions encoded in referring
expressions.

Abstract:

The task of referring expression generation is concerned with determining
what semantic content should be used in a reference to an intended referent
so that the hearer will be able to identify that referent. The task has been
a focus of interest within natural language generation at least since the
early 1980s, in part because the problem appears relatively well-defined.
Over the last 25 years, a range of algorithms and approaches have been
proposed and explored, making this the most intensely studied problem in
natural language generation; and yet, even a casual analysis of real
human-authored texts suggests that we have a long way to go in terms of
providing an explanation for the range of real linguistic behaviour that we
find. In this talk, I'll review research in the area to date, try to
characterise where we are now, and point to directions for future research
in the area.