Related papers: Communicating Semantics: Reference by Description

Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how…

Classical semantics assumes that one can model reference, predication and quantification with respect to a fixed domain of precise referent objects. Non-logical terms and quantification are then interpreted directly in terms of elements and…

Pronoun disambiguation in understanding text and discourse often requires the application of both general pragmatic knowledge and context-specific information. In AI and linguistics research, this has mostly been studied in cases where the…

In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the…

Entity linking involves aligning textual mentions of named entities to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base. Entity linking systems often exploit relations between textual mentions in a document (e.g., coreference) to decide if…

Naming game simulates the process of naming an object by a single word, in which a population of communicating agents can reach global consensus asymptotically through iteratively pair-wise conversations. We propose an extension of the…

Citation texts are sometimes not very informative or in some cases inaccurate by themselves; they need the appropriate context from the referenced paper to reflect its exact contributions. To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised…

We propose a general class of language models that treat reference as an explicit stochastic latent variable. This architecture allows models to create mentions of entities and their attributes by accessing external databases (required by,…

Semantic web information is at the extremities of long pipelines held by human beings. They are at the origin of information and they will consume it either explicitly because the information will be delivered to them in a readable way, or…

Referring expressions are natural language descriptions that identify a particular object within a scene and are widely used in our daily conversations. In this work, we focus on segmenting the object in an image specified by a referring…

Neural methods for embedding entities are typically extrinsically evaluated on downstream tasks and, more recently, intrinsically using probing tasks. Downstream task-based comparisons are often difficult to interpret due to differences in…

Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…

Many practical applications of dialogue technology require the generation of responses according to a particular developer-specified persona. While a variety of personas can be elicited from recent large language models, the opaqueness and…

In linguistics, coherence can be achieved by different means, such as by maintaining reference to the same set of entities across sentences and by establishing discourse relations between them. However, most existing work on coherence…

Understanding searchers' queries is an essential component of semantic search systems. In many cases, search queries involve specific attributes of an entity in a knowledge base (KB), which can be further used to find query answers. In this…

To build agents that can collaborate effectively with others, recent research has trained artificial agents to communicate with each other in Lewis-style referential games. However, this often leads to successful but uninterpretable…

Entity disambiguation (ED) is the task of mapping an ambiguous entity mention to the corresponding entry in a structured knowledge base. Previous research showed that entity overshadowing is a significant challenge for existing ED models:…

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being…

Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…

Building conversational agents that can have natural and knowledge-grounded interactions with humans requires understanding user utterances. Entity Linking (EL) is an effective and widely used method for understanding natural language text…