Dealing with Semantic Underspecification in Multimodal NLP

Understand

Intelligent systems that aim at mastering language as humans do must deal with its semantic underspecification, namely, the possibility for a linguistic signal to convey only part of the information needed for communication to succeed.

• Consider the usages of the pronoun they, which can leave the gender and number of its referent(s) underspecified.
• Semantic underspecification is not a bug but a crucial language feature that boosts its storage and processing efficiency.
• Indeed, human speakers can quickly and effortlessly integrate semantically-underspecified linguistic signals with a wide range of non-linguistic information, e.g., the multimodal context, social or cultural conventions, and shared knowledge.