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Collaborating on Referring Expressions

Paper · 1995 · Peter A. Heeman and Graeme Hirst

Summary

Heeman and Hirst study what happens when a hearer cannot identify the object a speaker is describing and the two must work together to fix the reference. They start from Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), a descriptive account drawn from experiments in which people described hard-to-name tangram figures, and turn it into a computational, plan-based model.

In their model, a referring expression is a plan derivation. Producing a description is plan construction, and finding its referent is plan inference. Clarification moves, such as judging or refashioning a description, become meta-actions that examine and edit that derivation. A second tier models the collaboration itself. Each agent holds a mental state containing the referring goal, intentions, and a shared current plan. Rules tied to this state allow an agent to accept a partner's clarification and to adopt its own goals to clarify.

There is no quantitative evaluation. The contribution is showing that the descriptive theory can be made computational, using a single knowledge source for both generation and understanding.

Key points

  • The basis is Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs's (1986) collaborative model. In it, participants present, judge (accept, reject, postpone) and refashion (repair, expand, replace) a referring expression until it is good enough for current purposes.
  • The model has two tiers:
    • a planning component that handles both generation and understanding;
    • a collaboration component that links the agent's mental state to the planning processes through acceptance and goal-adoption rules.
  • The current plan, and a proposed clarification, can be accepted even if they do not yet lead to successful identification of the referent.
  • The scope is deliberately limited:
    • referring expressions are studied in isolation;
    • mechanisms are assumed to be mutually known, and objects known to both agents;
    • input and output are surface speech act representations, not natural-language strings;
    • belief revision is not modelled.
  • The authors propose a London-Lund corpus dialog (Svartvik and Quirk 1980, S.2.4a:1-8) as a benchmark for future work on references embedded in other activities.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of TorontoToronto · Canada96 works · 142,007 citations🎓University of RochesterRochester · United States36 works · 7,398 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Peter A. Heeman and Graeme Hirst. 1995. Collaborating on Referring Expressions. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{heeman1995collaborating,
  title = {{Collaborating on Referring Expressions}},
  author = {Peter A. Heeman and Graeme Hirst},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1995},
  doi = {10.5555/216261.216267},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/216261.216267}
}

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