A Simple Method for Resolution of Definite Reference in a Shared Visual Context

Siebert A, Schlangen D. A Simple Method for Resolution of Definite Reference in a Shared Visual Context. In: Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue. Columbus, Ohio: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2008: 84-87

Speakers use their own discourse model to determine referents' accessibility during the production of referring expressions.

We report two experiments that investigated the widely-held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions, by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (relative to definite NPs) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, but whether their addressee heard that the referent was mentioned had no effect, indicating that speakers use their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced fewer pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned a referential competitor than when it mentioned the referent, but this effect did not differ depending on whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee's

Reference resolution in multi-modal interaction: Preliminary observations

In this paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems but do not give general solutions. Rather we decide to perform more detailed research on reference resolution in uni-modal contexts to obtain methods generalizable to multi-modal contexts. Since we try to build applications for a Dutch audience and since hardly any research has been done on reference resolution for Dutch, we give results on the resolution of anaphoric and deictic references in Dutch texts. We hope to be able to extend these results to our multimodal contexts later

Crossmodal content binding in information-processing architectures

Operating in a physical context, an intelligent robot faces two fundamental problems. First, it needs to combine information from its different sensors to form a representation of the environment that is more complete than any of its sensors on its own could provide. Second, it needs to combine high-level representations (such as those for planning and dialogue) with its sensory information, to ensure that the interpretations of these symbolic representations are grounded in the situated context. Previous approaches to this problem have used techniques such as (low-level) information fusion, ontological reasoning, and (high-level) concept learning. This paper presents a framework in which these, and other approaches, can be combined to form a shared representation of the current state of the robot in relation to its environment and other agents. Preliminary results from an implemented system are presented to illustrate how the framework supports behaviours commonly required of an intelligent robot

Referential precedents in spoken language comprehension: a review and meta-analysis

Listeners’ interpretations of referring expressions are influenced by referential precedents—temporary conventions established in a discourse that associate linguistic expressions with referents. A number of psycholinguistic studies have investigated how much precedent effects depend on beliefs about the speaker’s perspective versus more egocentric, domain-general processes. We review and provide a meta-analysis of visual-world eyetracking studies of precedent use, focusing on three principal effects: (1) a same speaker advantage for maintained precedents; (2) a different speaker advantage for broken precedents; and (3) an overall main effect of precedents. Despite inconsistent claims in the literature, our combined analysis reveals surprisingly consistent evidence supporting the existence of all three effects, but with different temporal profiles. These findings carry important implications for existing theoretical explanations of precedent use, and challenge explanations based solely on the use of information about speakers’ perspectives