The ability to ground conversational referents is a key requirement for human dialogue. This process, known as reference resolution, has received much attention from both psycholinguists seeking to understand how humans process language and computer scientists seeking to improve the performance of language-capable agents. However, the majority of previous research has focused on what we term closed-world reference resolution, in which the set of possible referents is assumed to be known a priori.
@incollection{williamsscheutz15cogsci,
title={A Domain-Independent Model of Open-World Reference Resolution},
author={Tom Williams and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2015},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/williamsscheutz15cogsci.pdf}
}