Speakers use their own discourse model to determine referents' accessibility during the production of referring expressions.

We report two experiments that investigated the widely-held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions, by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (relative to definite NPs) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, but whether their addressee heard that the referent was mentioned had no effect, indicating that speakers use their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced fewer pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned a referential competitor than when it mentioned the referent, but this effect did not differ depending on whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee's

Referential precedents in spoken language comprehension: a review and meta-analysis

Listeners’ interpretations of referring expressions are influenced by referential precedents—temporary conventions established in a discourse that associate linguistic expressions with referents. A number of psycholinguistic studies have investigated how much precedent effects depend on beliefs about the speaker’s perspective versus more egocentric, domain-general processes. We review and provide a meta-analysis of visual-world eyetracking studies of precedent use, focusing on three principal effects: (1) a same speaker advantage for maintained precedents; (2) a different speaker advantage for broken precedents; and (3) an overall main effect of precedents. Despite inconsistent claims in the literature, our combined analysis reveals surprisingly consistent evidence supporting the existence of all three effects, but with different temporal profiles. These findings carry important implications for existing theoretical explanations of precedent use, and challenge explanations based solely on the use of information about speakers’ perspectives

Tentative Reference Acts? ‘Recognitional Demonstratives’ as Means of Suggesting Mutual Knowledge – or Overriding a Lack of It

In an explorative study on German oral corpus data we investigate recognitional use of proximal demonstratives as a means of explicit speaker-hearer interaction shaping the discourse structure. We show that recognitionals mark tentative reference acts in that speakers suggest - or pretend - mutual knowledge of the referent, at the same time appealing to the hearers to accept the reference. Hearers may tacitly or explicitly accept the referential act or deny it asking for clarification, in the latter case making speakers change the intended local discourse topic. On these grounds we argue against a differentiation between recognitional and indefinite demonstratives, subsuming both as kinds of recognitional use under ‘pretended’ cognitive proximity

Does pre-planning explain why predictability affects reference production?

How does thematic role predictability affect reference production? This study tests a planning facilitation hypothesis – that the predictability effect on reference form can be explained in terms of the time course of utterance planning. In a discourse production task, participants viewed two sequential event pictures, listened to a description of the first picture (depicting a transfer event between two characters), and then provided a description of the second picture (continuing with one thematic role character, either goal or source). We replicated previous findings that goal continuations lead to more reduced forms of reference and shorter latency to begin speaking than source continuations. Additionally, we tracked speakers’ eye movements in two periods of utterance planning, early vs. late. We found that 1) early pre-planning supports the use of reduced forms but is not affected by thematic role; 2) thematic role only affects late planning; and 3) in contrast with our hypothesis, planning does not account for predictability effects on reduced forms. We then speculate that discourse connectedness drives the thematic role predictability effect on reference form choice

NeuralREG: An end-to-end approach to referring expression generation

Traditionally, Referring Expression Generation (REG) models first decide on the form and then on the content of references to discourse entities in text, typically relying on features such as salience and grammatical function. In this paper, we present a new approach (NeuralREG), relying on deep neural networks, which makes decisions about form and content in one go without explicit feature extraction. Using a delexicalized version of the WebNLG corpus, we show that the neural model substantially improves over two strong baselines. Data and models are publicly available.Comment: Accepted for presentation at ACL 201

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

It is known that acoustic variation is influenced by the predictability of words and the information that they represent. What is unknown is whether acoustic reduction is also influenced by the referential predictability of thematic roles. We tested this question in two production experiments, where speakers heard a sentence with goal/source arguments, e.g., “Lady Mannerly [source] gave a painting to Sir Barnes [goal],” and described a picture of a subsequent action, e.g., “Sir Barnes threw it in the closet.” We analyzed the duration of full NP descriptions used to refer to the pictured character. We found that duration was shorter for references to the goal than the source, but only in Experiment 2, where the timing of the stimuli encouraged the participant to plan their response incrementally, and not Experiment 1, where participants could pre-plan their responses. The strongest finding across both experiments was that response latency predicted duration, and latency was influenced by the predictability of thematic roles: Goal continuations had significantly shorter latencies. Together, these findings suggest that thematic role predictability does affect acoustic duration, and may be related to the time needed for utterance planning

Integrating pragmatic reasoning in an efficiency-based theory of utterance choice

This thesis explores new methods of accounting for discourse-level linguistic phenomena, using computational modeling. When communicating, efficient speakers frequently choose to either omit, or otherwise reduce the length of their utterances wherever possible. Frameworks such as Uniform Information Density (UID) have argued that speakers preferentially reduce or omit those elements that are more predictable in context, and easier to recover. However, these frameworks have nothing to say about the effects of a linguistic choice on how a message is interpreted. I run 3 experiments which show that while UID posits no specific consequences to being "overinformative" (including more information in an utterance than is necessary), in fact overinformativeness can trigger pragmatic inferences which alter comprehenders' background beliefs about the world. In this case, I show that the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model, which models back-and-forth pragmatic reasoning between speakers and comprehenders, predicts both efficiency-based utterance choices, as well as any consequent change in perceived meaning. I also provide evidence that it's critical to model communication as a lossy process (which UID assumes), which allows the RSA model to account for phenomena that it otherwise is not able to. I further show that while UID predicts increased use of pronouns when referring to more contextually predictable referents, existing research does not unequivocally support this. I run 2 experiments which fail to show evidence that speakers use reduced expressions for predictable elements. In contrast to UID and similar frameworks, the RSA model can straightforwardly predict the results that have been observed to date. In the end, I argue that the RSA model is a highly attractive alternative for modeling speaker utterance choice at the discourse level. When it reflects communication as a lossy process, it is able to predict the same predictability-driven utterance reduction that UID does. However, by additionally modeling back-and-forth pragmatic reasoning, it successfully models utterance choice phenomena that simpler frameworks cannot account for.Diese Arbeit erforscht neue Methoden, linguistische Phänomene auf Gesprächsebene per Computermodellierung zu erfassen. Effiziente Sprecher:innen entscheiden sich bei der Kommunikation häufig dazu, wenn immer es möglich ist, Äußerungen entweder ganz auszulassen oder aber ihre Länge zu reduzieren. Modelle wie Uniform Information Density (UID) argumentieren, dass Sprecher:innen vorzugsweise diejenigen Elemente auslassen, die im jeweiligen Kontext vorhersagbarer und einfacher wiederherzustellen sind. Allerdings sagen diese Modelle nichts über die Auswirkungen einer linguistischen Entscheidung bezüglich der Interpretation einer Nachricht aus. Ich führe drei Experimente durch, die zeigen, dass wenngleich UID keine spezifischen Auswirkungen von "Überinformation" (einer Äußerung mehr Information als nötig geben) postuliert, Überinformationen doch pragmatische Schlussfolgerungen, die das gedankliche Weltmodell der Versteher:innen ändern können, auslöst. Für diesen Fall zeige ich, dass das Rational-Speech-Act-Modell (RSA), welches pragmatische Hin-und-Her-Schlussfolgerungen zwischen Sprecher:innen und Versteher:innen modelliert, sowohl effizienzbasierte Äußerungsauswahl als auch jegliche resultierende Verständnisänderung vorhersagt. Ich liefere auch Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass es entscheidend ist, Kommunikation als verlustbehafteten Prozess zu modellieren (wovon UID ausgeht), was es dem RSA-Modell erlaubt, Phänomene einzubeziehen, wozu es sonst nicht in der Lage wäre. Weiterhin zeige ich, dass obschon UID beim Bezug auf kontextuell vorhersagbarere Bezugswörter eine erhöhte Nutzung von Pronomen vorhersagt, dies von existierender Forschung nicht einstimmig gestützt wird. Ich führe zwei Experimente durch, die keine Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass Sprecher:innen reduzierte Ausdrücke für vorhersagbare Elemente verwenden, finden. Im Gegensatz zu UID und ähnlichen Modellen kann dass RSA-Modell direkt die bislang beobachteten Resultate vorhersagen. Schließlich lege ich dar, warum das RSA-Modell eine höchst attraktive Alternative zur Modellierung von Sprachäußerungsentscheidungen auf Gesprächsebene ist. Wenn es Kommunikation als einen verlustbehafteten Prozess widerspiegelt, kann es dieselbe vorhersagebasierte Äußerungsreduktion vorhersagen wie auch UID. Modelliert man jedoch zusätzlich pragmatische Hin-und-Her-Schlussfolgerungen, modelliert RSA erfolgreich Phänomene bei Äußerungsentscheidungen, die einfachere Modelle nicht abbilden können.German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of SFB 1102 - Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL

Between anaphora and deixis...the resolution of the demonstrative noun-phrase ‘that N’

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent

Knowledge likely held by others affects speakers’ choices of referential expressions at different stages of discourse

Effective communication requires adjusting one’s discourse to be understood by the addressee. While some suggest that choices of referring expressions are dependent on the addressee’s accessibility to the referent, there is also evidence for an egocentric bias in speech production. This study relied on two new experimental tasks designed to assess whether speakers adapt their choices of referential expressions when introducing movie characters that are either likely known or likely unknown by their addressee, and when maintaining or reintroducing these characters at a later point in the discourse. Results revealed an adjustment to the addressee in the use of character’s names (increased for likely known characters) and definite expressions (increased for likely unknown characters) observed at all the discourse stages. Use of indefinite expressions and names was affected by the participant’s own knowledge specifically when introducing the characters. These results indicate that speakers take their addressee’s likely knowledge into account at multiple discourse stages