Computational Generation of Referring Expressions

This chapter offers a survey of computational research on Referring Expression Generation (reg). The main body of the text comes from an article that was published in the journal Computational Linguistics in 2012; the preamble places the survey in the context of later developments. The survey introduces the reg problem and describes early work in this area, discussing what basic assumptions lie behind it, and showing how its remit has widened over the years. It discusses some computational frameworks underlying reg, and demonstrate a recent trend that seeks to link reg algorithms with well-established Knowledge Representation techniques. Considerable attention is given to recent efforts at evaluating reg algorithms and the lessons that they allow us to learn. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what we still see as important aspects of the way forward in this area of computational research, focusing particularly on referring in larger and more realistic settings.