Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution

Abstract

Humans use natural language, vision, and context to resolve referents in their environment. While some situated reference resolution is trivial, ambiguous cases arise when the language is underspecified or there are multiple candidate referents. This study investigates how pragmatic modulators external to the linguistic content are critical for the correct interpretation of referents in these scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate in a human subjects experiment how the social norms applicable in the given context influence the interpretation of referring expressions. Additionally, we highlight how current coreference tools in natural language processing fail to handle these ambiguous cases. We also briefly discuss the implications of this work for assistive robots which will routinely need to resolve referents in their environment.