We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and
events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the
hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a
sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material
that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent
communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue
that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the
representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation
must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and
semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably
at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its
(incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and
reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and
realization.Comment: 10 pages, uses QobiTree.te
