A Cross-Linguistic Study on the Production of Multimodal Referring Expressions in Dialogue
Ielka van der Sluis, Saturnino F. Luz · 2011
This paper presents a cross-linguistic data elicitation study on fully realised referring ex-pressions (REs) in a dialogue context. A web-based experiment was set up in which partici-pants were asked to choose REs to be uttered by one of two agents for identifying five tar-gets in a scripted dialogue. Participants were told that the agent would point at the referents while uttering their chosen linguistic descrip-tions. The study was conducted in English, Japanese, Portuguese and Dutch and yielded a total of 1190 referring expressions. Our hypotheses concern sets of objects that need to be considered for identification depending on the effect of the pointing gesture. Re-sults show interesting and significant differ-ences between the language groups. 1