Giulianelli, Mario;
Fernández, Raquel;
(2021)
Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context.
In:
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning.
(pp. pp. 647-660).
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Abstract
Speakers are thought to use rational information transmission strategies for efficient communication (Genzel and Charniak, 2002; Aylett and Turk, 2004; Jaeger and Levy, 2007). Previous work analysing these strategies in sentence production has failed to take into account how the information content of sentences varies as a function of the available discourse context. In this study, we estimate sentence information content within discourse context. We find that speakers transmit information at a stable rate—i.e., rationally—in English newspaper articles but that this rate decreases in spoken open domain and written task-oriented dialogues. We also observe that speakers’ choices are not oriented towards local uniformity of information, which is another hypothesised rational strategy. We suggest that a more faithful model of communication should explicitly include production costs and goal-oriented rewards.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context |
| Event: | 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning |
| Dates: | Nov 2021 - Nov 2021 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.50 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.50 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 1963–2025 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216488 |
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