Incorporating extra-linguistic information into reference resolution in collaborative task dialogue

This paper proposes an approach to reference resolution in situated dialogues by exploiting extra-linguistic information. Recently, investigations of referential behaviours involved in situations in the real world have received increasing attention by researchers (Di Eugenio et al., 2000; Byron, 2005; van Deemter, 2007; Spanger et al., 2009). In order to create an accurate reference resolution model, we need to handle extra-linguistic information as well as textual information examined by existing approaches (Soon et al., 2001; Ng and Cardie, 2002, etc.). In this paper, we incorporate extra-linguistic information into an existing corpus-based reference resolution model, and investigate its effects on reference resolution problems within a corpus of Japanese dialogues. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 79.0 % for this task.