Evaluating Salience Metrics for the Context-Adequate Realization of Discourse Referents

摘要

We describe the application of a framework for salience metrics and linguistic variability with respect to the contextually adequate choice of referring expressions and grammatical roles: Where multiple meaning-equivalent candidate realizations are available that differ in one of these aspects, NLG systems can apply salience metrics to predict contextually adequate realization preferences. We evaluate this claim and a number of parameters of salience metrics found in the theoretical literature on two German newspaper corpora. Key features of the approach described here include the application of a two-dimensional model of salience, how its theoretical predictions can be exploited to develop salience metrics for a particular phenomenon, and that these salience metrics can be subsequently applied to other phenomena. This approach can be applied to develop classifiers to predict packaging preferences for phenomena where little training data is available.