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Influence of personal choices on lexical variability in referring expressions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2015

RAQUEL HERVÁS ,
JAVIER ARROYO ,
VIRGINIA FRANCISCO ,
FEDERICO PEINADO  and
PABLO GERVÁS
RAQUEL HERVÁS
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain e-mails: raquelhb@fdi.ucm.es, javier.arroyo@fdi.ucm.es, virginia@fdi.ucm.es, fpeinado@fdi.ucm.es, pgervas@sip.ucm.es
JAVIER ARROYO
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain e-mails: raquelhb@fdi.ucm.es, javier.arroyo@fdi.ucm.es, virginia@fdi.ucm.es, fpeinado@fdi.ucm.es, pgervas@sip.ucm.es
VIRGINIA FRANCISCO
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain e-mails: raquelhb@fdi.ucm.es, javier.arroyo@fdi.ucm.es, virginia@fdi.ucm.es, fpeinado@fdi.ucm.es, pgervas@sip.ucm.es
FEDERICO PEINADO
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain e-mails: raquelhb@fdi.ucm.es, javier.arroyo@fdi.ucm.es, virginia@fdi.ucm.es, fpeinado@fdi.ucm.es, pgervas@sip.ucm.es
PABLO GERVÁS
Affiliation:
Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain e-mails: raquelhb@fdi.ucm.es, javier.arroyo@fdi.ucm.es, virginia@fdi.ucm.es, fpeinado@fdi.ucm.es, pgervas@sip.ucm.es
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Abstract

Variability is inherent in human language as different people make different choices when facing the same communicative act. In Natural Language Processing, variability is a challenge. It hinders some tasks such as evaluation of generated expressions, while it constitutes an interesting resource to achieve naturalness and to avoid repetitiveness. In this work, we present a methodological approach to study the influence of lexical variability. We apply this approach to TUNA, a corpus of referring expression lexicalizations, in order to study the use of different lexical choices. First, we reannotate the TUNA corpus with new information about lexicalization, and then we analyze this reannotation to study how people lexicalize referring expressions. The results show that people tend to be consistent when generating referring expressions. But at the same time, different people also share certain preferences.

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Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 257 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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