Generating referring expressions is a task that has received a great deal of attention in the natural-language generation community, with an increasing amount of recent effort targeted at the generation of multimodal referring expressions. However, most implemented systems tend to assume very little shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer, and therefore must generate fully-elaborated linguistic references. Some systems do include a representation of the physical context or the dialogue context; however, other sources of contextual information are not normally used. Also, the generated references normally consist only of language and, possibly, deictic pointing gestures.

In this paper we present a psycholinguistically motivated architecture and its prototypical implementation for an incremental conceptualizer, which monitors dynamic changes in the world and simultaneously generates warnings for (possibly) safety-critical developments. It does so by conceptualizing events and building up a hierarchical knowledge representation of the perceived states of affairs. If it detects a safety problem, it selects suitable elements from the representation for a warning, brings them into an appropriate order, and generates incremental preverbal messages (propositional structures) from them, which can be taken by a subsequent component to encode them linguistically.