Modeling Uncertainty about the Linguistic Input in Sentence Comprehension.PPT

Acknowledgements Thank you for all you help! UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab: Adam Bickett Klinton Bicknell Gabriel Doyle Albert Park Nathaniel Smith Cyril Allauzen and the rest of the developers of the OpenFst () and GRM libraries (/~fsmtools/grm/) the people that r Thank you for listening! /~rlevy Let’s recast the problem in even more general terms Rational models of comprehension: the comprehender uses all the information currently available to form beliefs and make decisions In local-coherence sentences, on the other hand, the comprehender seems to be systematically ignoring some of the available information Local-coherence effects thus challenge us with the question: to what extent is human sentence comprehension rational? * * This is input1_1 combined with grammar * Here we have posterior1_1 going to posterior1_2. The first bit of input was “I saw either b or c”. The second bit of input was “I probably saw f, not e” * First row is posterior1_1 and posterior 1_2 Second row is posterior 2_1 and 2_2 * These results are also robust to different choices of the penalty for larger Levenshtein distance, and to the choice of frequency cutoff * * A Fully Rational Model of Local-coherence Effects Modeling Uncertainty about the Linguistic Input in Sentence Comprehension Roger Levy UC San Diego CUNY — 14 March 2008 Incrementality and Rationality Online sentence comprehension is hard But lots of information sources can be usefully brought to bear to help with the task Therefore, it would be rational for people to use all the information available, whenever possible This is what incrementality is We have lots of evidence that people do this often “Put the apple on the towel in the box.” (Tanenhaus et al., 1995) But…what do you think of this sentence? The coach smiled at the player tossed the frisbee. …and contrast this with: The coach smiled at the player thrown the frisbee. The coach smiled at the player who was thrown the frisbe