Incremental Interpretation and Production Across Clauses
Carlos A. Gómez Gallo · 2011
Abstract There is ample evidence that humans process language incrementally. Comprehen-ders decode the linguistic signal as it unfolds over time. Speakers start articulatingas soon as parts of the intended, preverbal message have been encoded linguistically.Yet, much remains unknown about the incremental comprehension and production of amessage. In particular psycholinguistic work has mostly been limited to behavioral ex-periments, thus relatively little is known about incremental production of spontaneousspeech. In this dissertation, we use richly annotated speech corpora to investigate howspeakers interpret and convey a message across clauses.This dissertation has three parts. Part I introduces two novel corpora. One ofthese has multiple layers of annotation that make it ideally suited to psycholinguisticsand computational linguists working on incremental processing. Part II presents a casestudy of how the same methods can be used to develop computational models of parsingin a conversational dialog architecture. Part III presents case studies that show howcomputational methods combined with richly annotated corpora can be used to studyincremental production in task-based communication.Part II discusses standard computational models developed in the field of NaturalLanguage Processing. These models proceed in essentially an off-line manner. Pars-ing proceeds sentence-by-sentence, so that interpretation only becomes available afteran entire sentence is processed. These models are incompatible with psycholinguisticfindings. This part presents a proof of concept that semantic expectations can be in-corporated in the probability models used in automatic parsing as the linguistic signalunfolds.