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.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.conll-1.50
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- CoNLL
- SIG:
- SIGNLL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 647–660
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.conll-1.50
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.50
- Cite (ACL):
- Mario Giulianelli and Raquel Fernández. 2021. Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 647–660, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context (Giulianelli & Fernández, CoNLL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.conll-1.50.pdf
- Code
- dmg-illc/uid-dialogue
- Data
- PhotoBook