126,967 research outputs found
Reference and the facilitation of search in spatial domains
This is a pre-final version of the article, whose official publication is expected in the winter of 2013-14.Peer reviewedPreprin
Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation
This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language
Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from
non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the
field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new
(usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology.
This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on
the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are
organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that
have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas
of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG
evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural
Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the
relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118
pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Parallel Attention: A Unified Framework for Visual Object Discovery through Dialogs and Queries
Recognising objects according to a pre-defined fixed set of class labels has
been well studied in the Computer Vision. There are a great many practical
applications where the subjects that may be of interest are not known
beforehand, or so easily delineated, however. In many of these cases natural
language dialog is a natural way to specify the subject of interest, and the
task achieving this capability (a.k.a, Referring Expression Comprehension) has
recently attracted attention. To this end we propose a unified framework, the
ParalleL AttentioN (PLAN) network, to discover the object in an image that is
being referred to in variable length natural expression descriptions, from
short phrases query to long multi-round dialogs. The PLAN network has two
attention mechanisms that relate parts of the expressions to both the global
visual content and also directly to object candidates. Furthermore, the
attention mechanisms are recurrent, making the referring process visualizable
and explainable. The attended information from these dual sources are combined
to reason about the referred object. These two attention mechanisms can be
trained in parallel and we find the combined system outperforms the
state-of-art on several benchmarked datasets with different length language
input, such as RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and GuessWhat?!.Comment: 11 page
Speaker emotion can affect ambiguity production
Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say ⊠first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat âŠ). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective
How Do I Address You? Modelling addressing behavior based on an analysis of a multi-modal corpora of conversational discourse
Addressing is a special kind of referring and thus principles of multi-modal referring expression generation will also be basic for generation of address terms and addressing gestures for conversational agents. Addressing is a special kind of referring because of the different (second person instead of object) role that the referent has in the interaction. Based on an analysis of addressing behaviour in multi-party face-to-face conversations (meetings, TV discussions as well as theater plays), we present outlines of a model for generating multi-modal verbal and non-verbal addressing behaviour for agents in multi-party interactions
Exploiting visual salience for the generation of referring expressions
In this paper we present a novel approach to generating
referring expressions (GRE) that is tailored to a model of the visual context the user is attending to. The approach
integrates a new computational model of visual salience in simulated 3-D environments with Dale and Reiterâs (1995) Incremental Algorithm. The advantage of our GRE framework are: (1) the context set used by the GRE algorithm is dynamically computed by the visual saliency algorithm as a user navigates through a simulation; (2) the integration of visual salience into the generation process means that in some instances underspecified but sufficiently detailed descriptions of the target object are generated that are shorter than those generated by GRE algorithms which focus purely on adjectival and type attributes; (3) the integration of visual saliency into the generation process means that our GRE algorithm will in some instances succeed in generating a description of the target object in situations where GRE algorithms which focus purely on adjectival and type attributes fail
The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.
Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is âavailableâ to the
addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds,
but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether
their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts
than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring
expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds
responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously.
This suggests that, despite early socialâcognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new
contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than
perceptual context
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