Spatial Reference Resolution for an Embodied Dialogue Agent

In order to understand the meaning of these sentences, we must solve two resolution problems. The first sentence introduces two entities to our domain, Mary and John and can be semantically represented as likes(Mary, John). In the second sentence, we encounter the two pronouns he and her. The task is to then resolve the variables he to John and her to Mary, providing the appropriate semantics of the sentence. [gave(John, rose, Mary)] Dialogue systems like COMMUNICATOR, TRIPS and TRAINS all include some manner of reference resolution (Byron & Allen 1998). These traditional systems only consider elements of the discourse history and planning state as referents for an ambiguous expression. Extra-linguistic information, such as gesturing or spatial orientation, is ignored. Our work looks to extend this previous work to include spatial context in reference resolution. This is a natural extension of previous work, and holds potential in embedded applications (cars, houses) and robotics.