In the field of referring expression generation, while in the static domain both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations have been considered, extrinsic evaluation in the dynamic domain, such as in a situated collaborative dialog, has not been discussed in depth. In a dynamic domain, a crucial problem is that referring expressions do not make sense without an appropriate preceding dialog context. I...

In this paper we describe a cross-linguistic experiment in attribute selection for referring expression generation. We used a graph-based attribute selection algorithm that was trained and cross-evaluated on English and Dutch data. The results indicate that attribute selection can be done in a largely language independent way.

There is a prevailing assumption in the literature on referring expression generation that relations are used in descriptions only ‘as a last resort’, typically on the basis that including the second entity in the relation introduces an additional cognitive load for either speaker or hearer. In this paper, we describe an experiemt that attempts to test this assumption; we determine that, even i...

Current Referring Expression Generation algorithms rely on domain dependent preferences for both content selection and linguistic realization. We present two experiments showing that human speakers may opt for dispreferred properties and dispreferred modifier orderings when these were salient in a preceding interaction (without speakers being consciously aware of this). We discuss the impact of...

Research on generating referring expressions has so far mostly focussed on “oneshot reference”, where the aim is to generate a single, discriminating expression. In interactive settings, however, it is not uncommon for reference to be established in “installments”, where referring information is offered piecewise until success has been confirmed. We show that this strategy can also be advantage...

Traditional approaches to referring expression generation (REG) have taken as a fundamental requirement the need to distinguish the intended referent from other entities in the context. It seems obvious that this should be a necessary condition for successful reference; but we suggest that a number of recent investigations cast doubt on the significance of this aspect of reference. In the prese...