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<Paper uid="P89-1009">
  <Title>COOKING UP REFERRING EXPRESSIONS</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> EPICURE (Dale 1989a, 1989b) is a natural language generation system whose principal concern is the generation of referring expressions which pick out complex entities in connected discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In particular, the system generates natural language descriptions of cookery recipes. Given a top level goal, the program first decomposes that goal recursively to produce a plan consisting of operations at a level of detail commensurate with the assumed knowledge of the hearer. In order to describe the resulting plan, EPICURE then models its execution, so that the processes which produce referring expressions always have access to a representation of the ingredients in the state they are in at the time of description.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper describes that part of the system responsible for the generation of subsequent referring expressions, i.e., references to entities which have already been mentioned in the discourse. The most notable features of the approach taken here are as follows: (a) the use of a sophisticated underlying ontology, to permit the representation of non-singular entities; (b) the use of two levels of semantic representation, in conjunction with a model of the discourse, to produce appropriate anaphoric referring expressions; (c) the use of a notion of discrimiaatory power, to determine what properties should be used in describing an entity; and (d) the use of a PATR-1ike unification grammar (see, for example, Karttunen (1986); Shieber (1986)) to produce surface linguistic strings from input semantic structures.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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