restrictivedescribe

Restrictivedescribe is a term used in linguistics and natural language generation to denote the practice of constructing a description that restricts the set of entities a noun phrase could refer to. The description aims to narrow reference to a subset that satisfies certain properties or relations, thereby reducing ambiguity in discourse.

In practice, restrictivedescribe may be realized with adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, or other descriptive elements that specify essential constraints. A restrictive description contrasts with more general or non-restrictive descriptions that merely add information without narrowing the referent set. The goal is to produce a phrase that uniquely identifies the intended referent within a given context.

Applications of restrictivedescribe appear in natural language processing, dialogue systems, and information retrieval, where generating unambiguous noun phrases is important for grounding and interaction. For example, in a visual grounding task, “the blue chair beside the window” restricts the reference to a single chair in view, assuming the context provides enough distinguishing features. In text generation, restrictive descriptions help disambiguate entities described earlier in a discourse.

Challenges include balancing brevity with discriminative power, ensuring the described properties hold in the real world, and accounting for context-dependent knowledge. Evaluations typically involve referential success rates and user studies on clarity and naturalness.

The term is not universally standardized and is used to describe a general class of referential techniques rather than a fixed linguistic category. Related concepts include definite descriptions, disambiguation, and referential form.