Learning Distributions over Logical Forms for Referring Expression Generation

We present a new approach to referring expression generation, casting it as a density estimation problem where the goal is to learn distributions over logical expressions identifying sets of objects in the world. Despite an extremely large space of possible expressions, we demonstrate effective learning of a globally normalized log-linear distribution. This learning is enabled by a new, multi-stage approximate inference technique that uses a pruning model to construct only the most likely logical forms. We train and evaluate the approach on a new corpus of references to sets of visual objects. Experiments show the approach is able to learn accurate models, which generate over 87% of the expressions people used. Additionally, on the previously studied special case of single object reference, we show a 35% relative error reduction over previous state of the art.