Abstract
In data-driven natural language generation, we typically know what relation should be expressed and need to select a connective to lexicalize it. In the current contribution, we analyse whether a sophisticated connective generation module is necessary to select a connective, or whether this can be solved with simple methods (such as random choice between connectives that are known to express a given relation, or usage of a generic language model). Comparing these methods to the distributions of connective choices from a human connective insertion task, we find mixed results: for some relations, it is acceptable to lexicalize them using any of the connectives that mark this relation. However, for other relations (temporals, concessives) either a more detailed relation distinction needs to be introduced, or a more sophisticated connective choice module would be necessary.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.codi-main.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and Online
- Editors:
- Chloé Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Annie Louis, Michael Strube, Amir Zeldes
- Venue:
- CODI
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 72–83
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.codi-main.7
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.codi-main.7
- Cite (ACL):
- Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, and Vera Demberg. 2021. A practical perspective on connective generation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, pages 72–83, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A practical perspective on connective generation (Yung et al., CODI 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2021.codi-main.7.pdf