@inproceedings{giulianelli-fernandez-2021-analysing,
    title = "Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context",
    author = "Giulianelli, Mario  and
      Fern{\'a}ndez, Raquel",
    editor = "Bisazza, Arianna  and
      Abend, Omri",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2021.conll-1.50/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.50",
    pages = "647--660",
    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."
}