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Referral phrases identify people, places, or things, and are part of pragmatics. Grammatically, nouns refer to classes, not expressions. Referential utterances use the definite article or demonstrative pronouns. Natural language generation requires consideration of both grammatical and contextual issues.
A referral phrase is any word or phrase whose purpose is to identify a particular person, place, or thing. It is usually a noun, a noun phrase or a pronoun. In linguistics, identifying reference expressions and their relationship to the real-world objects they refer to is part of the study of pragmatics, which describes the relationship between language and the real-world situations that language describes. Reference utterance generation is a subfield of natural language generation, which uses computers to produce text that mimics human speech as closely as possible.
Grammatically, all nouns refer to people, places, things, or ideas, but not all refer to expressions. For example, the sentence “A beagle is a breed of dog” contains three nouns: “beagle”, “breed”, and “dog”. Each of these, however, refers to a class of things, rather than a specific thing, and therefore none refer to expressions. To put it differently, the purpose of the sentence is to provide information about beagles in general rather than directing the reader’s attention to a particular beagle. On the other hand, in the sentence “That dog is a beagle”, “that dog” is a reference expression because it indicates a specific dog and provides information about it.
In English, a referential utterance will often contain the definite article, “the,” or a demonstrative pronoun such as “that” or “these,” so that the sentence distinguishes a particular object from all other similar ones. For example, the phrase “that mammoth” would clearly indicate a particular mammoth and therefore would be a reference expression, whereas “a mammoth” would not. Sometimes, however, the grammatical structure of a single sentence is not enough to determine whether a sentence is a referential utterance. In the sentence “The mammoth ate mostly grasses,” “the mammoth” could refer to a particular mammoth, or it could be a description of mammoths in general, depending on its context.
A practical application of pragmatics is natural language generation. To create reference utterances that clearly and unambiguously indicate the intended referent, natural language programmers must consider both grammatical and contextual issues. For example, computer-generated language like human language should not contain pronouns that could grammatically or logically refer to more than one real-world noun or object. In this way, the generation of the reference expression is the flip side of anaphora resolution, which uses various algorithms to determine the referents of pronouns in computer- or human-generated text.
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