RI: Small: Collaborative Reference in Open Domains

参照，即使用语言表达在世界上挑出物体的能力，是交流的基本组成部分。认知科学家已经表明，人们在参照上进行合作，例如通过协商如何描述事物。 这个项目为计算机系统做同样的事情奠定了基础。最终的应用范围从可以在真实的物理环境中与人交流的会说话的机器人，到可以对专业概念进行理解性解释的辅导和决策支持系统。 这些应用程序是开放的领域，在这个意义上，一个对话者，或两者，可能没有一个不熟悉的对象简单的observer。 因此，系统必须有灵活的策略来描述的话和推理机制，承认的可能性，由eithersystem或user.This项目的误解进行了探索性的工作所需的协作参考在开放领域的沟通策略和推理机制。 在学年期间，PI Stone与一名计算机科学专业的学生合作，利用该学生在认知建模、规划和学习方面正在进行的研究，扩展了一个原型系统，并提供了在不确定情况下进行协作的额外方法。 在夏天，Stone与一个由三名成员组成的跨学科团队合作，进行语料库分析、语法开发和集成，以利用粗略描述和部分-整体关系来描述形状的通用策略。 结果是一个开源原型，具有更一般的协作引用能力沿着特定的假设，通过可扩展的语言和概念分析，了解这些能力如何影响系统在引用不熟悉的对象时的成功。

Reference, the ability to single out objects in the world usinglinguistic expressions, is a fundamental part of communication.Cognitive scientists have showed that people collaborate on reference,for example by negotiating about how to describe things. This projectlays the groundwork for computer systems that can do the same.Eventual applications range from talking robots that can communicatewith people in real physical environments, to tutoring anddecision-support systems that can give comprehensible explanations ofspecialized concepts. These applications are open domains, in thesense that one interlocutor, or both, may have no simple descriptorfor an unfamiliar object. So the system has to have flexiblestrategies for describing things in words and inference mechanismsthat acknowledge the possibility of a misunderstanding by eithersystem or user.This project undertakes exploratory work on the communicativestrategies and inference mechanisms required for collaborativereference in open domains. During the academic year, PI Stone workswith a computer science student to extend a prototype system withadditional methods for collaborating under uncertainty, drawing on thestudent's ongoing research in cognitive modeling, planning andlearning. During the summer, Stone works with a three-memberinterdisciplinary team doing corpus analysis, grammar development andintegration to characterize generic strategies for describing shape,using rough descriptions and part-whole relationships. The resultsare an open-source prototype with more general collaborative referenceabilities along with specific hypotheses, informed by publishablelinguistic and conceptual analyses, about how these abilities mightaffect the system's success in referring to unfamiliar objects.