Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: a Computational Model of Communal Common Ground

Roman Kutlak, Kees van Deemter, Chris Mellish

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article

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Abstract

This article presents a computational model of the production of referring expressions under uncertainty over the hearer’s knowledge. Although such situations have seldom been addressed in the computational literature, they are common in ordinary communication, for example when a writer addresses an unknown audience, or when a speaker addresses a stranger. We propose a computational model composed of three complimentary heuristics based on, respectively, an estimation of the recipient’s knowledge, an estimation of the extent to which a property is unexpected, and the question of what is the optimum number of properties in a given situation. The model was tested in an experiment with human readers, in which it was compared against the Incremental Algorithm and human-produced descriptions. The results suggest that the new model outperforms the Incremental Algorithm in terms of the proportion of correctly identified entities and in terms of the perceived quality of the generated descriptions.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1275
Pages (from-to)1-18
Number of pages18
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Aug 2016

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Uncertainty
Communication
Experiments
Heuristics

Keywords

  • generation of referring expressions
  • computational model
  • common ground
  • audience design
  • corpus

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science(all)
  • Psychology(all)

Cite this

Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience : a Computational Model of Communal Common Ground. / Kutlak, Roman; van Deemter, Kees; Mellish, Chris.

In: Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 7, 1275, 31.08.2016, p. 1-18.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article

Kutlak, R, van Deemter, K & Mellish, C 2016, 'Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: a Computational Model of Communal Common Ground' Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 1275, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01275
Kutlak R, van Deemter K, Mellish C. Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: a Computational Model of Communal Common Ground. Frontiers in Psychology. 2016 Aug 31;7:1-18. 1275. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01275
Kutlak, Roman ; van Deemter, Kees ; Mellish, Chris. / Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience : a Computational Model of Communal Common Ground. In: Frontiers in Psychology. 2016 ; Vol. 7. pp. 1-18.
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  • Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: A Computational Model of Communal Common Ground

    Copyright © 2016 Kutlak, van Deemter and Mellish. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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