GRE3D7: A Corpus of distinguishing descriptions for objects in visual scenes

Recent years have seen a trend towards empirically motivated and more data-driven approaches in the field of referring expression generation (REG). Much of this work has focussed on initial reference to objects in visual scenes. While this scenario of use is one of the strongest contenders for real-world applications of referring expression generation, existing data sets still only embody very simple stimulus scenes. To move this research forward, we require data sets built around increasingly complex scenes, and we need much larger data sets to accommodate their higher dimensionality. To control the complexity, we also need to adopt a hypothesis-driven approach to scene design. In this paper, we describe GRE3D7, the largest corpus of humanproduced distinguishing descriptions available to date, discuss the hypotheses that underlie its design, and offer a number of analyses of the 4480 descriptions it contains.