The Computational Complexity of Avoiding Conversational Implicatures

Referring expressions and other object descriptions should be maximal under the Local Brevity, No Unnecessary Components, and Lexical Preference preference rules; otherwise, they may lead hearers to infer unwanted conversational implicatures. These preference rules can be incorporated into a polynomial time generation algorithm, while some alternative formalizations of conversational impficature make the generation task NP-Hard.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1990
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Ehud Reiter
• Keywords: ACL 1990, ACL 2007, Lexical Preference, Preference Rules, Unwanted Conversational Implicatures