Production of referring Eexpressions (PRE-CogSci) 2009 : bridging the gap between computational and empirical approaches to reference

Abstract

How do speakers refer to entities? This question has been addressed by both psycholinguists and computational linguists. A referring expression is typically defined as one which is produced in order to identify an object or set of objects for a listener or reader, in a relevant domain of discourse. In spite of several decades of research on the topic, our understanding of it is still incomplete, in part due to a lack of communication between psycholinguists and computational linguists, a remarkable state of affairs given the substantial overlap in the topics that these practitioners have investigated. Among these topics, the following have stood out in recent years: Over- and underspecification: Why and how do speakers overspecify when they produce referring expressions? Under what conditions do they underspecify?