Faro, Portugal the 8th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium

Referring expressions (including descriptions such as “the man with the hat” and pronouns such as “he”) play a central role in communication, and their production has been studied extensively both from an empirical, psycholinguistic and a computational perspective. Psycholinguistic studies of reference production have yielded many interesting ideas (for instance concerning common ground and alignment), but the resulting theories tend to be somewhat sketchy and informal. Computational theories of reference production, on the other hand, often result in explicit and practically useful algorithms, which are unsatisfactory, however, as models of human linguistic behavior. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in trying to bridge the gap between these two approaches. In this talk I will describe a number of recent developments in this area, focussing on two topics in particular. The first concerns the production of referring expressions in interactive settings: I will present new experimental evidence showing that existing algorithms for the production of referring expressions fail to account for how references are produced in interaction. The second concerns overspecification, the phenomenon that referring expressions often include information that listeners do not strictly need for the purpose of identification. In this talk, I discuss recent findings on why speakers produce overspecified descriptions and on how listeners interpret them. Finally, I discuss what a psychologically plausible computational model of reference production might look like. This work was done within the NWO VICI project “Bridging the hap between psycholinguistcs and computational linguistics: The case of referring expessions” See: http://bridging.uvt.nl/ PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS 7 Multiobjective Simulated Annealing based Approach for Feature Selection in Anaphora Resolution Asif Ekbal, Sriparna Saha, Olga Uryupina and Massimo Poesio Indian Inst of Technology Patna, India; Univ of Trento, Italy, Univ Essex, UK