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arXiv · 1702.03121

Modeling Semantic Expectation: Using Script Knowledge for Referent Prediction

Ashutosh Modi·Ivan Titov·Vera Demberg·Asad Sayeed·Manfred Pinkal
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Abstract

Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the factors that affect human prediction by building a computational model that can predict upcoming discourse referents based on linguistic knowledge alone vs. linguistic knowledge jointly with common-sense knowledge in the form of scripts. We find that script knowledge significantly improves model estimates of human predictions. In a second study, we test the highly controversial hypothesis that predictability influences referring expression type but do not find evidence for such an effect.

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Ashutosh Modi, Ivan Titov, Vera Demberg, Asad Sayeed, Manfred Pinkal. 2017-02-10. Modeling Semantic Expectation: Using Script Knowledge for Referent Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03121

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