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The Role of the Gricean Maxims in the Generation of Referring Expressions

Robert Dale·Ehud Reiter
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Abstract

Grice's maxims of conversation [Grice 1975] are framed as directives to be followed by a speaker of the language. This paper argues that, when considered from the point of view of natural language generation, such a characterisation is rather misleading, and that the desired behaviour falls out quite naturally if we view language generation as a goal-oriented process. We argue this position with particular regard to the generation of referring expressions.

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Robert Dale, Ehud Reiter. 1996-04-18. The Role of the Gricean Maxims in the Generation of Referring Expressions. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9604006

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