Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks

Mario Giulianelli


Abstract
This position paper proposes a conceptual framework for the design of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems that follow efficient and effective production strategies in order to achieve complex communicative goals. In this general framework, efficiency is characterised as the parsimonious regulation of production and comprehension costs while effectiveness is measured with respect to task-oriented and contextually grounded communicative goals. We provide concrete suggestions for the estimation of goals, costs, and utility via modern statistical methods, demonstrating applications of our framework to the classic pragmatic task of visually grounded referential games and to abstractive text summarisation, two popular generation tasks with real-world applications. In sum, we advocate for the development of NLG systems that learn to make pragmatic production decisions from experience, by reasoning about goals, costs, and utility in a human-like way.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.544
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7978–7984
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.544
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.544
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mario Giulianelli. 2022. Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7978–7984, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks (Giulianelli, EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.544.pdf