Christian Clark


2021

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Surprisal Estimators for Human Reading Times Need Character Models
Byung-Doh Oh | Christian Clark | William Schuler
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

While the use of character models has been popular in NLP applications, it has not been explored much in the context of psycholinguistic modeling. This paper presents a character model that can be applied to a structural parser-based processing model to calculate word generation probabilities. Experimental results show that surprisal estimates from a structural processing model using this character model deliver substantially better fits to self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and fMRI data than those from large-scale language models trained on much more data. This may suggest that the proposed processing model provides a more humanlike account of sentence processing, which assumes a larger role of morphology, phonotactics, and orthographic complexity than was previously thought.