A Bottom-Up Parsing Model of Local Coherence Effects
Emily Morgan, Frank Keller, Mark J. Steedman · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2010
Human sentence processing occurs incrementally.Most models of human processing rely on parsers that always build connected tree structures.But according to the theory of Good Enough parsing (Ferreira & Patson, 2007), humans parse sentences using small chunks of local information, not always forming a globally coherent parse.This difference is apparent in the study of local coherence effects (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson, 2004), wherein a locally plausible interpretation interferes with the correct global interpretation of a sentence.We present a model that accounts for these effects using a wide-coverage parser that captures the idea of Good Enough parsing.Using Combinatory Categorial Grammar, our parser works bottom-up, enforcing the use of local information only.We model the difficulty of processing a sentence in terms of the probability of a locally coherent reading relative to the probability of the globally coherent reading of the sentence.Our model successfully predicts psycholinguistic results.