@inproceedings{giulianelli-etal-2021-information,
    title = "Is Information Density Uniform in Task-Oriented Dialogues?",
    author = "Giulianelli, Mario  and
      Sinclair, Arabella  and
      Fern{\'a}ndez, Raquel",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.emnlp-main.652/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.652",
    pages = "8271--8283",
    abstract = "The Uniform Information Density principle states that speakers plan their utterances to reduce fluctuations in the density of the information transmitted. In this paper, we test whether, and within which contextual units this principle holds in task-oriented dialogues. We show that there is evidence supporting the principle in written dialogues where participants play a cooperative reference game as well as in spoken dialogues involving instruction giving and following. Our study underlines the importance of identifying the relevant contextual components, showing that information content increases particularly within topically and referentially related contextual units."
}