Dialogue Reference In A Visual Domain

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.