Experimental versus In-Corpus Variation in Referring Expression Choice

T. Mark Ellison, Fahime Same


Abstract
In this paper, we compare the results of three studies. The first explored feature-conditioned distributions of referring expression (RE) forms in the original corpus from which the contexts were taken. The second is a crowdsourcing study in which we asked participants to express entities within a pre-existing context, given fully specified referents. The third study replicates the crowdsourcing experiment using Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluate how well the corpus itself can model the variation found when multiple informants (either human participants or LLMs) choose REs in the same contexts. We measure the similarity of the conditional distributions of form categories using the Jensen-Shannon Divergence metric and Description Length metric. We find that the experimental methodology introduces substantial noise, but by taking this noise into account, we can model the variation captured from the corpus and RE form choices made during experiments. Furthermore, we compared the three conditional distributions over the corpus, the human experimental results, and the GPT models. Against our expectations, the divergence is greatest between the corpus and the GPT model.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.597
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6838–6848
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.597
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
T. Mark Ellison and Fahime Same. 2024. Experimental versus In-Corpus Variation in Referring Expression Choice. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6838–6848, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Experimental versus In-Corpus Variation in Referring Expression Choice (Ellison & Same, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.lrec-main.597.pdf