Referring expression generation in interaction: a graph-based perspective

Reference is important in everyday interactions: people can only exchange information about objects when they agree on how to refer to those objects. How this agreement may arise, and how we can model this in natural language generation, is the topic of this chapter. We argue that two possibly competing forces play a role. On the one hand, speakers may have inherent preferences for certain properties when referring to objects in a given domain. On the other, they may also have a tendency to adapt to the references produced by their dialogue partner. We describe how preferences can be determined, and how they interact with adaptation.