Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution

Mitchell Abrams, Matthias Scheutz


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 howpragmatic modulators external to the linguistic content are critical for the correct interpretation of referents in these scenarios. Inparticular, we demonstrate in a human subjects experiment how the social norms applicable in the given context influence theinterpretation of referring expressions. Additionally, we highlight how current coreference tools in natural language processing fail tohandle 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.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mitchell Abrams and Matthias Scheutz. 2022. Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1–11, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution (Abrams & Scheutz, NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.1.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.1.mp4