The roles of haptic-ostensive referring expressions in cooperative, task-based human-robot dialogue

Generating referring expressions is a task that has received a great deal of attention in the natural-language generation community, with an increasing amount of recent effort targeted at the generation of multimodal referring expressions. However, most implemented systems tend to assume very little shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer, and therefore must generate fully-elaborated linguistic references. Some systems do include a representation of the physical context or the dialogue context; however, other sources of contextual information are not normally used. Also, the generated references normally consist only of language and, possibly, deictic pointing gestures.