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.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.652
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8271–8283
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.652
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.652
- Cite (ACL):
- Mario Giulianelli, Arabella Sinclair, and Raquel Fernández. 2021. Is Information Density Uniform in Task-Oriented Dialogues?. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8271–8283, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Is Information Density Uniform in Task-Oriented Dialogues? (Giulianelli et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/2021.emnlp-main.652.pdf
- Code
- dmg-illc/uid-dialogue
- Data
- PhotoBook