Investigating the role of entropy in sentence processing

Tal Linzen, T. Florian Jaeger

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    We outline four ways in which uncertainty might affect comprehension difficulty in human sentence processing. These four hypotheses motivate a self-paced reading experiment, in which we used verb subcategorization distributions to manipulate the uncertainty over the next step in the syntactic derivation (single step entropy) and the surprisal of the verb's complement. We additionally estimate wordby- word surprisal and total entropy over parses of the sentence using a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG). Surprisal and total entropy, but not single step entropy, were significant predictors of reading times in different parts of the sentence. This suggests that a complete model of sentence processing should incorporate both entropy and surprisal.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publication5th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, CMCL 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Proceedings
    EditorsVera Demberg, Tim O�Donnell
    PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
    Pages10-18
    Number of pages9
    ISBN (Electronic)9781941643051
    StatePublished - 2014
    Event5th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, CMCL 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014 - Baltimore, United States
    Duration: Jun 26 2014 → …

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
    ISSN (Print)0736-587X

    Conference

    Conference5th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, CMCL 2014 at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2014
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityBaltimore
    Period6/26/14 → …

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computer Science Applications
    • Linguistics and Language
    • Language and Linguistics

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