As robots become increasingly prevalent in our society, it becomes increasingly important to endow them with natural language capabilities, including the ability to both understand and generate so-called referring expressions. In recent work, we have sought to enable referring expression understanding capabilities by leveraging the Givenness Hierarchy (GH), which provides an elegant linguistic framework for reasoning about notions of reference in human discourse.
@incollection{williams2017oxford,
title={Reference Resolution in Robotics: A Givenness Hierarchy Theoretic Approach},
author={Tom Williams and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2017},
booktitle={The Oxford Handbook of Reference},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/williams2017oxford.pdf}
}