Abstract

In their interesting 1995 paper, Dale & Reiter present various algorithms they developed alone or in tandem to determine the content of a distinguishing description. That is: a definite description which is an accurate characterization of the object being referred to, but not of any other object in the current `context set'. They argue that their Incremental Algorithm, discussed in more detail below, is the best one from a computational point of view (it has a low complexity and is fast) as well as from a psychological point of view (humans appear to do it in a similar way). Even though Dale & Reiter (1995) primarily aimed at investigating the computational implications of obeying the Gricean maxims, 89 the Incremental Algorithm has become more or less accepted as the state of the art for generating descriptions. However, due to their original motivation, various other aspects of the generation of definites remaine

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