Marika Sarzotti
2025
Towards Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Referring Expression Generation
Manar Ali
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Marika Sarzotti
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Simeon Junker
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Hendrik Buschmeier
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Sina Zarrieß
Proceedings of the 2025 CLASP Conference on Language models And RePresentations (LARP)
Referring Expression Generation (REG) has a long-standing tradition in computational linguistics, and often aims to develop cognitively plausible models of language generation and dialogue modeling, in a multimodal context. Traditional approaches to reference have been mostly symbolic, recent ones have been mostly neural. Inspired by the recent interest in neuro-symbolic approaches in both fields – language and vision – we revisit REG from these perspectives. We review relevant neuro-symbolic approaches to language generation on the one hand and vision on the other hand, exploring possible future directions for cognitively plausible models of reference generation/reference game modeling.