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# Production of Demonstratives in Dutch, English and Portuguese Dialogues

**Authors:** Saturnino Luz, Ielka van der Sluis · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W11-2825](https://aclanthology.org/W11-2825/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only; the study data: evaluation only

[**6** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2138270588) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/luz-2011-production-demonstratives-dutch-english-portuguese/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W11-28/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W11-2825/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W11-2825.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2138270588)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Saturnino Luz](https://openalex.org/A5060851208) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8430-7875) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/143896613) · h 30 · 3873 citations · 376 works
2. [Ielka van der Sluis](https://openalex.org/A5039279560) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0151-5044) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1738657550) · h 13 · 633 citations · 115 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper reports an elicitation study of indexical determiners (*this/that/these/those*, Dutch *deze/die*, Portuguese *este/aquele*) used with a pointing gesture. Participants read a scripted furniture-shop dialogue, in which a seller introduces five first-mention referents, and they chose a definite article, a proximal or a distal demonstrative for each. The study has 184 native speakers: 91 English, 51 Dutch and 42 Portuguese, giving 920 demonstratives and determiners. Two hypotheses are tested: accessibility (H1: Dutch uses proximals for hard-to-access referents, English and Portuguese the opposite) and distance (H2: proximal for near, distal for far). The distance hypothesis fits better in all three languages. For English, the distal is chosen for the far referent RE2 (81%), the proximal for the near-middle referent RE4 (69%) and the distal for RE5 (67%). For the middle referent RE3, English and Dutch speakers mostly chose the definite article rather than a demonstrative, which the authors read as the accessibility of an object previously mentioned as "the desk next to it".

## Ideas

- I1. A rule in the generator for English indexical determiners: a first-mention referent that is marked as pointed at takes *this/these* if the speaker-distance feature is near, *that/those* if far, and the definite article if the referent was introduced in the immediately preceding clause. Keep the three choices as an explicit enum, so each output says which rule fired.
- I2. Distance as a feature of the world: a position for each entity in `world` (near, middle, far from the speaker), derived from a text description ("on the left, far from the door"). The paper's table gives a check set for it.
- I3. Use the paper's exception as a rule: a referent given by "the X next to it" is accessible, so the definite article wins over the demonstrative for English. Measure how often the rule gives the definite article on the RE3 type of item.
- I4. Negative control: shuffle the distance labels across referents. The rule must score worse than with the true labels on the English table; otherwise the distance feature has no effect.

## For Mova

The chapters are [12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/) (the demonstrative and definite determiners, the near-far contrast) and [36. Discourse relations and coherence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/36-discourse-relations/) or [35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/) (the accessibility of a referent). The code is `coref/src/mention.rs` (mention type: definite, demonstrative, pronoun) and `world/src/story.rs` (entities and their locations). The measure: rule agreement with the English percentages in the paper (RE2 distal, RE4 proximal, RE5 distal), run twice for identical output, plus the shuffled-distance negative control. The study data are evaluation-only, so Mova's own English test items should be made from its texts.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{luz2011production,
  title = {{Production of Demonstratives in Dutch, English and Portuguese Dialogues}},
  author = {Luz, Saturnino and Sluis, Ielka van der},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W11-2825/}
}
```

- [← previous Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lundquist-2016-anticausatives-are-semantically-reflexive-norwegian/)
- [next → How do we get there? Evaluating transformer neural networks as cognitive models for English past tense inflection](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ma-2022-how-do-we-get-there/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

15 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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7. H. Clark and A. Bangerter. 2004. Changing ideas about reference. In I. Noveck and D. Sperber, editors, Experimental Pragmatics, pages 25–49. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_2)
8. H. Clark. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=H%2E+Clark%2E+1996%2E+Using+Language%2E+Cambridge+University+Press%2E)
9. J.K. Gundel, N. Hedberg, and R. Zacharski. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69(2):274–307. [↗](https://doi.org/10.2307/416535)
10. K. Jungbluth. 2005. Os pronomes demonstrativos do português brasileiro na fala e na escrita. Cadernos de Linguagem e Sociedade, 7:83–105. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=K%2E+Jungbluth%2E+2005%2E+Os+pronomes+demonstrativos+do+portugue%CC%82s+brasileiro+na+fala+e+na+escrita%2E+Cadernos+de+Linguagem+e+Sociedade%2C+7%3A83%E2%80%93105%2E)
11. P. Piwek and A. Cremers. 1996. Dutch and English demonstratives: A comparison. Language Sciences, 18(3-4):835–851. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1016/s0388-0001(96)00050-2)
12. P. Piwek, R. Beun, and A. Cremers. 2008. ‘Proximal’ and ‘distal’ in language and cognition: Evidence from deictic demonstratives in Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics, 40:694–718. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.001)
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14. I. Van der Sluis and S. Luz. 2011b. Issues in translating and producing Japanese referring expressions for dialogues. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 5(1):1–46. I. Van der Sluis, S. Luz W. Breitfuß, M. Ishizuka, and H. Prendinger. to appear. Cross-cultural assessment of automatically generated multimodal referring expressions in a virtual world. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. [↗](https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v5i.1227)
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