The AISB’08 Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2008)

Welcome to Aberdeen at the Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2008)! In this volume the papers presented at the MOG 2008 international symposium are collected

Generating Referring Expressions in a Multimodal Context

In this paper an algorithm for the generation of referring expressions in a multimodal setting is presented. The algorithm is based on empirical studies of how humans refer to objects in a shared workspace. The main ingredients of the algorithm are the following. First, the addition of deictic pointing gestures, where the decision to point is determined by two factors: the effort of pointing (measured in terms of the distance to and size of the target object) as well as the effort required for a full linguistic description (measured in terms of number of required properties and relations). Second, the algorithm explicitly keeps track of the current focus of attention, in such a way that objects which are closely related to the object which was most recently referred to are more prominent than objects which are farther away. To decide which object are ‘closely related’ we make use of the concept of perceptual grouping. Finally, each object in the domain is assigned a three-dimensional salience weight indicating whether it is linguistically and/or inherently salient and whether it is part of the current focus of attention. The resulting algorithm is capable of generating a variety of referring expressions, where the kind of NP is co-determined by the accessibility of the target object (in terms of salience), the presence or absence of a relatum as well as the possible inclusion of a pointing gesture

Wat gaan we eten? Groente! Kwantitatief onderzoek onder jongeren tussen de 12 en 18 jaar.

In 2009 a survey was conducted among a representative sample of around 500 young people between the ages of 12 and 18 in the Netherlands. The first section examined the eating patterns of the young people and their attitude towards nutrition. The second section examined their vegetable consumption and how they experience vegetables, as well as the factors which influence this. The final section consisted of a choosing experiment, in which the participants were asked to choose from among two or three vegetable products and evaluate them on the basis of a number of product characteristics