The impact of visual context on the content of referring expressions

Traditional approaches to referring expression gen-eration (REG) have taken as a fundamental require-ment the need to distinguish the intended referent from other entities in the context. It seems obvious that this should be a necessary condition for success-ful reference; but we suggest that a number of recent investigations cast doubt on the significance of this aspect of reference. In the present paper, we look at the role of visual context in determining the content of a referring expression, and come to the conclu-sion that, at least in the referential scenarios under-lying our data, visual context appears not to be a ma-jor factor in content determination for reference. We discuss the implications of this surprising finding.