Abstract
East Asian languages are thought to handle reference differently from English, particularly in terms of the marking of definiteness and number. We present the first Data-Text corpus for Referring Expressions in Mandarin, and we use this corpus to test some initial hypotheses inspired by the theoretical linguistics literature. Our findings suggest that function words deserve more attention in Referring Expression Generation than they have so far received, and they have a bearing on the debate about whether different languages make different trade-offs between clarity and brevity.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | INLG 2017 - 10th International Natural Language Generation Conference, Proceedings of the Conference |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
| Pages | 213-217 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781945626524 |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2017 |
| Event | 10th International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG 2017 - Santiago de Compostela, Spain Duration: 4 Sept 2017 → 7 Sept 2017 |
Conference
| Conference | 10th International Natural Language Generation Conference, INLG 2017 |
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| Country/Territory | Spain |
| City | Santiago de Compostela |
| Period | 4/09/17 → 7/09/17 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant no. 61433015. We thank Stephen Matthews, University of Hong Kong, for comments, and Albert Gatt, University of Malta, for access to Dutch TUNA.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Association for Computational Linguistics.