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Producing Referring Expressions in Dialogue : Insights from a Translation Exercise

This paper discusses some of the challenges which arise in comparing the outputs of an algorithm for generating referring expressions across languages and cultures. The context in which the algorithm is employed and evaluated is a virtual environment, and the referring expressions in question form part of a dialogue script “acted out” by two virtual agents in a furniture shop. This setup was created in order to enable us to assess perceptions of a scene by English- and Japanese-speaking subjects with respect to naturalness of dialogue and behaviour of virtual agents, among other things. We show that the process of translating the dialogues from English into Japanese reveals a variety of contextual factors which need to be taken into account for the generation and evaluation of dialogues to be successful in the target language. We focus on issues related to the use of referring expressions, specially: the utility of different types of attributes in the identification of objects, the realisation of locative expressions, and how to deal with the absence of a distinction between singulars and plurals in Japanese. These issues impact on the design and evaluation of algorithms for generating referring expressions in interactive situations, and call into question the extent to which current algorithms are transferrable between languages and cultures,