Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 31 October 2013, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

Producing Referring Expressions: How do speakers do it, and how to model this computationally?

Emiel Krahmer
Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC)
Tilburg University

Referring expressions (including descriptions such as "the man with the hat" and pronouns such as "he") play a central role in communication, and their production has been studied extensively both from an empirical, psycholinguistic and from a computational perspective.

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in trying to bridge the gap between these two approaches. In this talk, I will start by motivating work on reference production from the perspective of Natural Language Generation, briefly discussing data-to-text and image-to-text applications which convert data and/or images into natural language texts, followed by a short discussion of the strengths and limitations of existing computational models of reference production.

The remainder of the talk highlights two aspects which arguably are understudied in these models. The first concerns the production of referring expressions in interactive settings: I will present new experimental evidence showing that existing algorithms for the production of referring expressions fail to account for how references are produced in interaction. The second concerns overspecification, the phenomenon that referring expressions may include information that listeners do not strictly speaking need for the purpose of identification. In this talk, I discuss recent findings on why speakers produce overspecified descriptions and on how listeners interpret them. Finally, I discuss what a psychologically plausible computational model of reference production might look like.

This work was done within the NWO VICI project "Bridging the hap between psycholinguistcs and computational linguistics: The case of referring expessions" See: http://bridging.uvt.nl/

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Maria Staudte.