Remodelling complement coercion interpretation

Existing (experimental and computational) linguistic work uses participant paraphrases as a stand-in for event interpretation in complement coercion sentences (e.g. she finished the coffee \u3e she finished drinking the coffee). We present crowdsourcing data and modelling that supports broadening this conception. In particular, our results suggest that sentences where many participants do not give a paraphrase, or where many different paraphrases are given, are informative about to how complement coercion is interpreted in naturalistic contexts

A comparison of homonym meaning frequency estimates derived from movie and television subtitles, free association, and explicit ratings

First Online: 10 September 2018Most words are ambiguous, with interpretation dependent on context. Advancing theories of ambiguity resolution is important for any general theory of language processing, and for resolving inconsistencies in observed ambiguity effects across experimental tasks. Focusing on homonyms (words such as bank with unrelated meanings EDGE OF A RIVER vs. FINANCIAL INSTITUTION), the present work advances theories and methods for estimating the relative frequency of their meanings, a factor that shapes observed ambiguity effects. We develop a new method for estimating meaning frequency based on the meaning of a homonym evoked in lines of movie and television subtitles according to human raters. We also replicate and extend a measure of meaning frequency derived from the classification of free associates. We evaluate the internal consistency of these measures, compare them to published estimates based on explicit ratings of each meaning’s frequency, and compare each set of norms in predicting performance in lexical and semantic decision mega-studies. All measures have high internal consistency and show agreement, but each is also associated with unique variance, which may be explained by integrating cognitive theories of memory with the demands of different experimental methodologies. To derive frequency estimates, we collected manual classifications of 533 homonyms over 50,000 lines of subtitles, and of 357 homonyms across over 5000 homonym–associate pairs. This database—publicly available at: www.blairarmstrong.net/homonymnorms/—constitutes a novel resource for computational cognitive modeling and computational linguistics, and we offer suggestions around good practices for its use in training and testing models on labeled data

A Usage-Based Model of Early Grammatical Development

The representations and processes yield-ing the limited length and telegraphic style of language production early on in acqui-sition have received little attention in ac-quisitional modeling. In this paper, we present a model, starting with minimal lin-guistic representations, that incrementally builds up an inventory of increasingly long and abstract grammatical representations (form+meaning pairings), in line with the usage-based conception of language ac-quisition. We explore its performance on a comprehension and a generation task, showing that, over time, the model bet-ter understands the processed utterances, generates longer utterances, and better ex-presses the situation these utterances in-tend to refer to.

Two measures for complement coercion interpretation: Interpretation vs production for complement coercion

Complement coercion interpretation is typically operationalized in terms of verb paraphrases (she finished the book > she finished reading the book), reflecting the construal of a specific event triggered by the direct object (cf. Pustejovsky & Bouillon). However, when given the option, participants frequently, and selectively, refrain from providing verb paraphrases for naturally occurring sentences. We present a corpus study of the pragmatic factors that affect the rate of refraining from giving a verb paraphrases, followed by two experiments. First, a fill-in-the-blank experiment shows that minimally different clause types containing complement coercion yield different rates of verb paraphrase. Second, we pair complement coercion sentences with possible verb paraphrases and obtain semantic (entailment) judgements from participants. Taken together, the results present a puzzle; participants’ likelihood to produce a verbal coercion interpretation is modulated by contextual factors, while their semantic comprehension of potential verb paraphrases for the same sentences is not

Exploring context’s role in the interpretation of novel noun compounds

Noun compounding is a productive word formation strategy in English. Low-frequency (hence: ‘novel’) noun compounds (NCs) like “animal teacher” elicit diverse responses when presented without a sentence context, suggesting that they are semantically underspecified. We explore exactly how much the role of context changes default interpretations of novel English NCs. We consider compounds with two plausible interpretations: OF-relations (teacher OF animals) and IS-relations (animal who IS a teacher). We predicted context would increase participants’ ratings of the plausibility of given compound interpretations. Corroborating our predictions, participant plausibility ratings showed OF-relations were more accessible out-of-context, and IS-relations were rated with less certainty. Mixed-effects modelling showed a significant interaction between context and relation type. The results suggest context increases interpretation certainty, particularly in OF-dominant compounds. However, several groups of cases notably defy this pattern. Finally, we use computational language models to identify aspects of context that are critical to novel NC interpretation