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<Paper uid="P02-1013">
  <Title>Generating Minimal Definite Descriptions</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In English and in many other languages, a possible function of definite descriptions is to identify a set of referents1: by uttering an expression of the form The N, the speaker gives sufficient information to the hearer so that s/he can identify the set of the objects the speaker is referring to.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> From the generation perspective, this means that, starting from the set of objects to be described and from the properties known to hold of these objects by both the speaker and the hearer, a definite description must be constructed which allows the user  hearer of some specific attributes the referent of the NP has. to unambiguously identify the objects being talked about.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> While the task of constructing singular definite descriptions on the basis of positive properties has received much attention in the generation literature (Dale and Haddock, 1991; Dale and Reiter, 1995; Horacek, 1997; Krahmer et al., 2001), for a long time, a more general statement of the task at hand remained outstanding. Recently however, several papers made a step in that direction. (van Deemter, 2001) showed how to extend the basic Dale and Reiter Algorithm (Dale and Reiter, 1995) to generate plural definite descriptions using not just conjunctions of positive properties but also negative and disjunctive properties; (Stone, 1998) integrates the D&amp;R algorithm into the surface realisation process and (Stone, 2000) extends it to deal with collective and distributive plural NPs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Notably, in all three cases, the incremental structure of the D&amp;R's algorithm is preserved: the algorithm increments a set of properties till this set uniquely identifies the target set i.e., the set of objects to be described. As (Garey and Johnson, 1979) shows, such an incremental algorithm while being polynomial (and this, together with certain psycholinguistic observations, was one of the primary motivation for privileging this incremental strategy) is not guaranteed to find the minimal solution i.e., the description which uniquely identifies the target set using the smallest number of atomic properties.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In this paper, I argue that this characteristic of the incremental algorithm while reasonably innocuous when generating singular definite descriptions using only conjunctions of positive properties, renders it Computational Linguistics (ACL), Philadelphia, July 2002, pp. 96-103. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for cognitively inappropriate when generalised to sets of individuals and disjunctive properties. I present an alternative approach which always produce the minimal description thereby avoiding the shortcomings of the incremental algorithm. I conclude by comparing the proposed approach with related proposals and giving pointers for further research.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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