Formal concept analysis for the generation of plural referring expressions

Abstract

Referring Expression Generation (REG) is one of the most relevant and complex tasks in Natural Language Generation. Plural referring expressions are linguistic expressions that intend to identify a set of objects in a certain context. In this paper we formulate for the first time plural referring expressions and the elements of the associated REG problem in terms of the well known Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) mathematical framework. We provide theoretical results and general algorithms for computing the whole collection of referable sets in the context under analysis, as well as a condensed representation of all referring expressions for each referable set.