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

Frontiers in Psychology

Roman Kutlak¹ 

关键词: generation of referring expressions;    computational model;    common ground;    audience design;    corpus;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01275

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

This article presents a computational model of the production of referring expressions under uncertainty over the hearer's knowledge. Although situations where the hearer's knowledge is uncertain 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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY