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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, April 12, 2013
12:45 PM
CSB 703
Frank Keller
University of Edinburgh
Prediction in Human Parsing
There is strong evidence that human sentence processing is incremental, i.e., that structures are built word by word. Recent experimental results show that the processor us also predictive, i.e., it can anticipate upcoming linguistic material on the basis of previous input. However, the granularity of this prediction process is currently unclear. We present evidence from two visual world experiments that show that speakers can make fine-grained predictions based on the frame and the frequency of a verb. We use this data to motivate a computational model of human parsing that includes an explicit mechanism for generating and verifying predictions. Based on this mechanism, our model can capture both locality effects and surprisal effects, and thus unify empirical results that have so far been accounted for separately. We evaluate the model on the Dundee eye-tracking corpus and on relative clause data that existing models fail to capture adequately.

Joint work with Manabu Arai, Vera Demberg, and Roger Levy.