Generating and Interpreting Referring Expressions as Belief State Planning and Plan Recognition

Planning-based approaches to reference provide a uniform treatment of linguistic decisions, from content selection to lexical choice. In this paper, we show how the issues of lexical ambiguity, vagueness, unspecific descriptions, ellipsis, and the interaction of subsective modifiers can be expressed using a belief-state planner modified to support context-dependent actions. Because the number of distinct denotations it searches grows doubly-exponentially with the size of the referential domain, we present representational and search strategies that make generation and interpretation tractable