Survey of Referring Expressions: brief introduction

Notice: The winning number of the book token draw is 814686-xxxxxx. If you took part in this survey and the first six digits of the code you received at the end of it match the number above, please email the last six digits of your code ielka.vandersluis@scss.tcd.ie or luzs@cs.tcd.ie to claim your book token. If you would still like to participate in the survey, without the possibility of winning a book token, please read on...

Goal

The goal of this short survey is to collect your opinions about the most natural way to refer to objects in a conversation. Different people might do this in different ways, depending on how they interpret the context in which the dialogue takes place. We are interested in your opinion, given the context described below.

What you will see

When you have finished with this tutorial and clicked on the button to start the survey you will be presented a screen that basically looks like the picture on the right.

The screen is separated in two parts. The upper part depicts a furniture store. It shows a number of furniture items, as well as a female and a male agent ("buyer" and "seller"). The bottom part shows a short dialogue between the male Seller of furniture and the female Buyer, who is interested in buying furniture for her office. We ask you to imagine that the Buyer and Seller (indicated in the figure by the male and female icons) remain stationary during the dialogue. That is, they do not walk around in the shop as they talk, but rather use pointing gestures to direct the attention to the particular furniture item they are talking about. These pointing gestures will be indicated in the text by captions in square brackets. For example: [points to object (1)].

You will not be able to see all the utterances in the dialogue at once, but you will be able to use the scroll bar on the right to move up and down through the dialogue.

What we ask you to do

When you look closely at the utterances in the dialogue, you will notice that there are five places in the Seller's utterances where an object (e.g a chair, a desk etc) or set of objects are supposed to be described. However, instead of one object description, several options are presented, as illustrated by the box labelled (1) in the figure above. You will also see a choice of determinars ("the", "this", "that") to accompany the object description, as shown in the box labelled (a) in the figure above. We are interested in finding out what you think would be the best, most natural choice of determiner and referring expression to indicate the object under discussion at that point in the dialogue. To make sure that you know which object is under discussion, the descriptions in the dialogue have a label that relate to an object or a group of objects in the picture at the upper part of the screen.

You are asked to select the description that you would use if you were the furniture Seller by ticking the box in front of that description. Once you have completed all selections, scroll to the bottom of the page, enter your details and, optionally, your comments on the answers, and press the "submit" button.

Please note that there is no right or wrong answers; all options are ok.
We are interested in your preference.

Many thanks for your help!