Incremental generation of plural descriptions : similarity and partitioning

Abstract

Approaches to plural reference generation emphasise descriptive brevity, but often lack empirical backing. This paper describes a corpus-based study of plural descriptions, and proposes a psycholinguisticallymotivated algorithm for plural reference generation. The descriptive strategy is based on partitioning and incorporates corpusderived heuristics. An exhaustive evaluation shows that the output closely matches human data.