Decisions on ellipsis and anaphora generation based on context-intimacy

Abstract

In a dialogue, ellipsis and anaphora are the main tools for reflecting the context appropriately. This paper suggests a decision strategy for applying ellipsis and anaphora with a viewpoint of context-intimacy in the response generation of a dialogue system. The decision of the context-intimacy is made on every word of a response sentence. The context-intimacy is either distinctive or intimate. If a word is a part of a context, then the context-intimacy of a word with that context is intimate and otherwise it is distinctive. The surface form of a word is decided differently according to whether the context neighbours with the word or not. Considering this, we suggest two evaluation criteria, one for the neighbouring context and the other for the separated context. © 1997 Oxford University Press.