SpaceRefNet: a neural approach to spatial reference resolution in a real city environment

Adding interactive capabilities to pedestrian wayfinding systems in the form of spoken dialogue will make them more natural to humans. Such an interactive wayfinding system needs to continuously understand and interpret pedestrian{'}s utterances referring to the spatial context. Achieving this requires the system to identify exophoric referring expressions in the utterances, and link these expressions to the geographic entities in the vicinity. This exophoric spatial reference resolution problem is difficult, as there are often several dozens of candidate referents. We present a neural network-based approach for identifying pedestrian{'}s references (using a network called RefNet) and resolving them to appropriate geographic objects (using a network called SpaceRefNet). Both methods show promising results beating the respective baselines and earlier reported results in the literature.