Toward Givenness Hierarchy Theoretic Natural Language Generation
This work tackles the problem of improving human-robot interaction through more natural communication, but it appears incremental as it extends existing theory from understanding to generation without introducing a new method.
The paper addresses the challenge of enabling robots to generate anaphoric language naturally in dialogues by adapting the Givenness Hierarchy theory, which was previously used for understanding, to the generation task.
Language-capable interactive robots participating in dialogues with human interlocutors must be able to naturally and efficiently communicate about the entities in their environment. A key aspect of such communication is the use of anaphoric language. The linguistic theory of the Givenness Hierarchy(GH) suggests that humans use anaphora based on the cognitive statuses their referents have in the minds of their interlocutors. In previous work, researchers presented GH-theoretic approaches to robot anaphora understanding. In this paper we describe how the GH might need to be used quite differently to facilitate robot anaphora generation.