Using Plan Recognition for Interpreting Referring Expressions

Referring expressions such as “a long meeting” and “a restaurant near my brother’s” depend on information from the context to be accurately resolved. Interpreting these expressions requires pragmatic inferences that go beyond what the speaker said to what she meant; and to do this one must consider the speaker’s decisions with respect to her initial belief state and the alternative linguistic options she may have had. Modeling reference generation as a planning problem, where actions corre- spond to words that change a belief state, suggests that interpretation can also be viewed as recognizing belief- state plans that contain implicit actions. In this paper, we describe how planners can be adapted and used to interpret uncertain referring expressions.