Generating effective referring expressions using charts

Abstract

We present a novel approach for generating effective referring expressions (REs). We define a synchronous grammar formalism that relates surface strings with the sets of objects they describe through an abstract syntactic structure. The grammars may choose to require or not that REs are distinguishing. We then show how to compute a chart that represents, in finite space, the complete (possibly infinite) set of valid REs for a target object. Finally, we propose a probability model that predicts how the listener will understand the RE, and show how to compute the most effective RE according to this model from the chart.