---
title: "Decision-Theoretic Salience Interactions in Language Generation"
authors:
  - "T. Pattabhiraman"
  - "Nick Cercone"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/172"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/0172.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1993
pages: "1246-1251"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# Decision-Theoretic Salience Interactions in Language Generation

T. Pattabhiraman, Nick Cercone

*Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1246-1251.

## Abstract

The salience of an entity is interpreted in natural language generation (NLG) as a measure of how well it stands out from other entities and biases the preference of the generator in selecting words and phrases. We delineate two categories, viz ., canonical salience and instantial salience, characterizing the former as a builtin preference in the conceptual- and linguistic knowledge of the speaker, and the latter as the prominence of specific objects in the context of NLG. This paper proposes that the interaction between these categories be formalized in terms of decision-theoretic combinations of probabilities and utilities, and construes phrase selection and basic level/entry level effects accordingly.