Reference resolution by human partners in a natural interactive problem-solving task

We examined how listeners circumscribe referential domains for referring expressions by monitoring participant’s eye movements as they engaged in a natural interactive problemsolving task with another naïve participant. This research had two goals: (1) determine whether existing psycholinguistic methodologies for studying online processing can be extended to interactive conversation, and (2) assess whether studying language in this manner can provide insight into the theoretical limitations of various strategies for reference resolution commonly employed in computational spoken dialogue systems.