The use of redundant adjectives on object names

Abstract

Treball de fi de màster en Lingüística Teòrica i Aplicada. Tutores: Dra. Carina Silberer, Dra. Gemma Boleda.

Referring expressions play an important role in object identification. This study analyzes the use of redundant color adjectives (RCAs) in reference to different object categories in largescale datasets of real-world images in order to investigate how this phenomenon displays in real-world scenes and whether it is in line with the results reported in previous artificially designed experiments. It quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes two types of data: naturalistic object descriptions and genuine referring expressions. The results on one hand confirm that the use of RCAs varies across object categories in real-world scenes; on the other hand, they also suggest that the use of color adjectives varies depending on the task settings (descriptive task compared to referential task in this study); and people may produce more RCAs for some specific subcategories of objects.