A model-based approach for on-screen item selection and disambiguation is provided. An utterance may be received by a computing device in response to a display of a list of items for selection on a display screen. A disambiguation model may then be applied to the utterance. The disambiguation model may be utilized to determine whether the utterance is directed to at least one of the list of displayed items, extract referential features from the utterance and identify an item from the list corresponding to the utterance, based on the extracted referential features. The computing device may then perform an action which includes selecting the identified item associated with utterance.