Abstract
A data elicitation study on the type of demonstratives
and determiners selected to denote
objects in English, Dutch and Portuguese dialogues
is presented. Participants were given
a scenario and a scripted dialogue in which
a furniture seller identifies target objects to
a buyer. They were then asked to choose a
combination of a determiner or demonstrative
and a referring expression to be uttered by the
seller and told that the agent would point at
the targets while uttering the chosen linguistic
descriptions. The study was conducted with
native speakers and rendered a total of 920
demonstratives and determiners. It focused
on accessibility of the target referents and
distance between agents and target referents.
Results show that the three language groups
largely agree in their preferences and, in contrast
to previous work, align with a nearby/far
away distinction.
and determiners selected to denote
objects in English, Dutch and Portuguese dialogues
is presented. Participants were given
a scenario and a scripted dialogue in which
a furniture seller identifies target objects to
a buyer. They were then asked to choose a
combination of a determiner or demonstrative
and a referring expression to be uttered by the
seller and told that the agent would point at
the targets while uttering the chosen linguistic
descriptions. The study was conducted with
native speakers and rendered a total of 920
demonstratives and determiners. It focused
on accessibility of the target referents and
distance between agents and target referents.
Results show that the three language groups
largely agree in their preferences and, in contrast
to previous work, align with a nearby/far
away distinction.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG'11) |
| Place of Publication | Nancy |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
| Pages | 181-186 |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |