Dialogue Reference in a Visual Domain

Jette Viethen, Simon Zwarts, Robert Dale, Markus Guhe


Abstract
A central purpose of referring expressions is to distinguish intended referents from other entities that are in the context; but how is this context determined? This paper draws a distinction between discourse context ―other entities that have been mentioned in the dialogue― and visual context ―visually available objects near the intended referent. It explores how these two different aspects of context have an impact on subsequent reference in a dialogic situation where the speakers share both discourse and visual context. In addition we take into account the impact of the reference history ―forms of reference used previously in the discourse― on forming what have been called conceptual pacts. By comparing the output of different parameter settings in our model to a data set of human-produced referring expressions, we determine that an approach to subsequent reference based on conceptual pacts provides a better explanation of our data than previously proposed algorithmic approaches which compute a new distinguishing description for the intended referent every time it is mentioned.
Anthology ID:
L10-1397
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/578_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jette Viethen, Simon Zwarts, Robert Dale, and Markus Guhe. 2010. Dialogue Reference in a Visual Domain. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Dialogue Reference in a Visual Domain (Viethen et al., LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/578_Paper.pdf