  This paper presents the results of a study on the semantic constraints
imposed on lexical choice by certain contextual indicators. We show how such
indicators are computed and how correlations between them and the choice of a
noun phrase description of a named entity can be automatically established
using supervised learning. Based on this correlation, we have developed a
technique for automatic lexical choice of descriptions of entities in text
generation. We discuss the underlying relationship between the pragmatics of
choosing an appropriate description that serves a specific purpose in the
automatically generated text and the semantics of the description itself. We
present our work in the framework of the more general concept of reuse of
linguistic structures that are automatically extracted from large corpora. We
present a formal evaluation of our approach and we conclude with some thoughts
on potential applications of our method.
