Generating natural language descriptions using speaker-dependent information

This paper discusses the issue of human variation in natural language referring expression generation. We introduce a model of content selection that takes speaker-dependent information into account to produce descriptions that closely resemble those produced by each individual, as seen in a number of reference corpora. Results show that our speaker-dependent referring expression generation model outperforms alternatives that do not take human variation into account, or which do so less extensively, and suggest that the use of machine-learning methods may be an ideal approach to mimic complex referential behaviour.