This body of research assumes a limited domain where the semantics of attributes and their allowed values can be formalized, though semantic representations and inference mechanisms are getting increasingly sophisticated (e.g., the use of description logic: Areces, Koller, and Striegnitz 2008;Ren, van Deemter, and Pan 2010).
siddharthan and Copestake (2004) consider open-domain generation of referring expressions in a regeneration task (text simplification); they take a different approach, approximating the hand-coded domainknowledge of earlier systems with a measure of relatedness for attribute-values that is derived from WordNet synonym and antonym links.