Generating overspecified referring expressions: the role of discrimination

Ivandré Paraboni, Michelle Galindo, Douglas Iacovelli


Abstract

We present an experiment to compare a standard, minimally distinguishing algorithm for the generation of relational referring expressions with two alternatives that produce overspecified descriptions. The experiment shows that discrimination - which normally plays a major role in the disambiguation task - is also a major influence in referential overspecification, even though disambiguation is in principle not relevant.