Abstract
Models of human sentence processing effort tend to focus on costs associated with retrieving structures and discourse referents from memory (memory-based) and/or on costs associated with anticipating upcoming words and structures based on contextual cues (expectation-based) (Levy,2008). Although evidence suggests that expectation and memory may play separable roles in language comprehension (Levy et al., 2013), theories of coreference processing have largely focused on memory: how comprehenders identify likely referents of linguistic expressions. In this study, we hypothesize that coreference tracking also informs human expectations about upcoming words, and we test this hypothesis by evaluating the degree to which incremental surprisal measures generated by a novel coreference-aware semantic parser explain human response times in a naturalistic self-paced reading experiment. Results indicate (1) that coreference information indeed guides human expectations and (2) that coreference effects on memory retrieval may exist independently of coreference effects on expectations. Together, these findings suggest that the language processing system exploits coreference information both to retrieve referents from memory and to anticipate upcoming material.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.coling-main.404
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Barcelona, Spain (Online)
- Editors:
- Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4587–4599
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.404
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.404
- Cite (ACL):
- Evan Jaffe, Cory Shain, and William Schuler. 2020. Coreference information guides human expectations during natural reading. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4587–4599, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Coreference information guides human expectations during natural reading (Jaffe et al., COLING 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.404.pdf
- Data
- Natural Stories, Penn Treebank