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Reference production in human-computer interaction: Issues for Corpus-based Referring Expression Generation

In the Natural Language Generation field, Referring Expression Generation (REG) studies often make use of experiments involving human subjects for the collection of corpora of definite descriptions. Experiments of this kind usually make use of web-based settings in which a single subject acts as a speaker with no particular addressee in mind (as a kind of monologue situation), or in which participant pairs are engaged in an actual dialogue. Both so-called monologue and dialogue settings are of course instances of real language use, but it is not entirely clear whether these situations are truly comparable or, to be more precise, whether REG studies may draw conclusions regarding attribute selection, referential overspecification and others regardless of the mode of communication. To shed light on this issue, in this work we developed a parallel, semantically annotated corpus of monologue and dialogue referring expressions, and carried out an experiment to compare instances produced in both modes of communication. Preliminary results suggest that human reference production may be indeed affected by the presence of a second (specific) human participant as the receiver of the communication in a number of ways, an observation that may be relevant for studies in REG and related fields.