Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of textual economy, which enhances communication efficiency by tightly integrating syntax and semantics to produce sentences that leverage inferential links, supported by the SPUD system.

Contribution

It defines textual economy as a new efficiency measure and demonstrates how integrated syntax-semantics representation and reasoning can achieve it through the SPUD system.

Findings

Textual economy improves communication efficiency.

SPUD system effectively implements integrated syntax-semantics reasoning.

Achieving textual economy requires advanced representation and reasoning capabilities.

Abstract

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization.