Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A method for generating simple comparison sentences of the form A is like B is proposed. The postulated input to the generator consists of the name of an entity A, and a set of descriptors about A in the form of attribute:value pairs. The main source of knowledge that controls decision making is a probabilistic conception of salience of empirically observable properties among concrete objects. W e also use a salience heuristic based on the notion of property intrinsicness. The information-theoretic concept of redundancy is used to quantify salience in probabilistic contexts. Salience factors influencing selection decisions are modeled as utilities and costs, and the decision for selecting the best object of comparison is based on the maximization of net expected utility. The method proposed has been implemented in a generation system written in CProlog.