Resolution of Referential Ambiguity Using Dempster-Shafer Theoretic Pragmatics

A major challenge for robots interacting with humans in realistic environments is handling robots' uncertainty with respect to the identities and properties of the people, places, and things found in their environments: a problem compounded when humans refer to these entities using underspecified language. In this paper, we present a framework for generating clarification requests in the face of both pragmatic and referential ambiguity, and show how we are able to handle several stages of this framework by integrating a Dempster-Shafer (DS)-theoretic pragmatic reasoning component with a probabilistic reference resolution component.