Dependency Locality Theory Massachusetts Institute 属地理论麻省理工学院.pptVIP

Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-based Theory of Linguistic Complexity Boris Krupa 5/4/2001 Motivation How does the brain construct an interpretation for a sentence? Dependency Locality Theory A theory of human computational resources in sentence parsing Key feature: A Case Study A Case Study In Japanese the same holds: How Can This Be Explained? The difficulty in comprehension of nested structures is determined by the maximal number of incomplete syntactic dependencies that the processor has to keep track of during the course of processing the sentence Great! Why? Test Theory This can be explained by the dependency locality theory Parsing of sentences consists of two major tasks: Integration of the current word into the structure built thus far Storage of the structure build thus far Both are associated with resource costs Integration costs – observations: - difficulty of processing an NP depends on the accessibility of the referent of the NP: focused entities, usually referred to with pronouns, are highly accessible vs. new discourse objects consume substantial resources - integration depends on the distance between the heads of the two phrases Theory Integration costs : a) 1 energy unit (EU) is consumed for every new discourse element b) When connecting a new input head h2 to a projection of an existing head h1, count 1 EU for every new referent in the intervening region Can account for the complexities and reading times of the above sentences, and compare difficulties of two grammatical formulations Example: The reporter who the photographer sent to the editor hoped for a good story a) 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 b) 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 The reporter who sent the photographer to the editor hoped for a good story a) 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0