Co-reference via Pointing and Haptics in Multi-Modal Dialogues

This paper describes our ongoing work on resolving third person pronouns and deictic words in a multi-modal corpus. We show that about two thirds of these referring expressions have antecedents that are introduced by pointing gestures or by haptic-ostensive actions (actions that involve manipulating an object). After describing our annotation scheme, we discuss the co-reference models we learn from multi-modal features. The usage of hapticostensive actions in a co-reference model is a novel contribution of our work.