18 research outputs found
Replication Data for: Investigating Locality Effects and Surprisal in Written English Syntactic Choice Phenomena
No full textThis datset can be used to replicate the main findings of our paper:
Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, Marten van Schinjdel, Michael White, and William Schuler. Investigating Locality Effects and Surprisal in Written English Syntactic Choice Phenomena. Cognition, To appea
Towards Broad Coverage Surface Realization with CCG
No full textThis paper reports on progress towards developing the first broad coverage English surface realizer for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). The paper provides initial automatic evaluation results which are roughly comparable to those reported with other formalisms when using a (nonblind) grammar derived from the development section of the CCGbank; the results are worse, though still respectable, when using the standard dev/train/test splits, highlighting the need for better lexical smoothing and more focused search. The paper also shows that factored language models that interpolate word-level n-grams with n-grams over POS tags and supertags provide similar absolute performance improvements over word-level n-grams as have been observed with parsing-inspired log-linear models.
Interference Predicts Locality: Evidence from an SOV Language
No full textLocality and Interference are two mechanisms which are attested to drive sentence comprehension. However, the relationship between them remains unclear---are they alternative explanations or do they operate independently? To answer this question, we test the hypothesis that in Hindi, interference effects (measured by semantic similarity and case markers) significantly predict locality effects (modelled using dependency length quantifying distance between syntactic heads and their dependents) within a sentence, while controlling for expectation-based measures and discourse givenness. Using data from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), we validate the stated hypothesis. We demonstrate that sentences with longer dependency length consistently have semantically similar preverbal dependents, more case markers, greater syntactic surprisal, and violate intra-sentential givenness considerations. Overall, our findings point towards the conclusion that locality effects are reducible to broader memory interference effects rather than being distinct manifestations of locality in syntax. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the theories of interference in comprehension
Locality and Expectation Effects in Hindi Preverbal Constituent Ordering
No full textWe investigate the relative impact of two influential theories of language comprehension, viz., Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson 2000; DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale 2001, Levy 2008), on preverbal constituent ordering in Hindi, a predominantly SOV language with flexible word order. Prior work in Hindi has shown that word order scrambling is influenced by information structure constraints in discourse. However, the impact of cognitively grounded factors on Hindi constituent ordering is relatively underexplored. We test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of syntactic choice, once information status and surprisal measures (estimated from n-gram i.e., trigram and incremental dependency parsing models) have been added to a machine learning model. Towards this end, we setup a framework to generate meaning-equivalent grammatical variants of Hindi sentences by linearizing preverbal constituents of projective dependency trees in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank (HUTB) corpus of written text. Our results indicate that dependency length displays a weak effect in predicting reference sentences (amidst variants) over and above the aforementioned predictors. Overall, trigram surprisal outperforms dependency length and parser surprisal by a huge margin and our analyses indicate that maximizing lexical predictability is the primary driving force behind preverbal constituent ordering choices in Hindi. The success of trigram surprisal notwithstanding, dependency length minimization predicts non-canonical reference sentences having fronted direct objects over variants containing the canonical word order, cases where surprisal estimates fail due to their bias towards frequent structures and word sequences. Locality effects persist over the Given-New preference of subject-object ordering in Hindi. Accessibility and local statistical biases discussed in the sentence processing literature are plausible explanations for the success of trigram surprisal. Further, we conjecture that the presence of case markers is a strong factor potentially overriding the pressure for dependency length minimization in Hindi. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the information locality hypothesis and theories of language production
UID and English Syntactic Choice
No full textFor the task of predicting a reference sentence amidst grammatical variants, what is the role of Uniform Information Density (UID) effects
