An empirical study on the generation of descriptions for nominal anaphors in Chinese

In this paper, we propose a preference rule for the generation of descriptions of nominal anaphors in Chinese. The rule emphasises using different forms of descriptions, full and reduced, to reflect the 'discourse structure' in the generated text. We performed experiments using a simple rule and then the preference rule on a set of descriptive texts. Comparing the results, the latter shows effectiveness to account for shifts of intentions. We finally show the implementation of the rule in our Chinese natural language generation system.