Aggregation via set partitioning for natural language generation

  • Authors:
  • Regina Barzilay;Mirella Lapata

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology;University of Edinburgh

  • Venue:
  • HLT-NAACL '06 Proceedings of the main conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The role of aggregation in natural language generation is to combine two or more linguistic structures into a single sentence. The task is crucial for generating concise and readable texts. We present an efficient algorithm for automatically learning aggregation rules from a text and its related database. The algorithm treats aggregation as a set partitioning problem and uses a global inference procedure to find an optimal solution. Our experiments show that this approach yields substantial improvements over a clustering-based model which relies exclusively on local information.