Generating One-Anaphoric Expressions: Where Does the Decision Lie?

Most natural language generation systems embody mechanisms for choosing whether to subsequently refer to an already-introduced entity by means of a pronoun or a definite noun phrase. Relatively few systems, however, consider referring to entites by means of one-anaphoric expressions such as \lingform{the small green one}. This paper looks at what is involved in generating referring expressions of this type. Consideration of how to fit this capability into a standard algorithm for referring expression generation leads us to suggest a revision of some of the assumptions that underlie existing approaches. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach to one-anaphora generation in the context of a simple database interface application, and make some observations about the impact of this approach on referring expression generation more generally.