| Real-life scenes contain many different objects, each of which can be referred to in many different ways. When speakers want to point out one of these objects to an addressee, they usually have no problems in quickly producing a referring expression singling out the intended object ("Do you see the man in blue clothes over there?"). How do speakers do this? More precisely, how do they go from the intention to point out an object to an addressee to the realization of this intention through spoken language, supported with appropriate gestures and facial expressions? This project studies the human production of referring expressions from both a computational and an experimental perspective, combining methodologies and insights from psycholinguistics with those of computational linguistics. |
