Modelling the Usage of Discourse Connectives as Rational Speech Acts
Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yūji Matsumoto · 2016
Discourse relations can either be implicit or explicitly expressed by markers, such as 'therefore' and 'but'.How a speaker makes this choice is a question that is not well understood.We propose a psycholinguistic model that predicts whether a speaker will produce an explicit marker given the discourse relation s/he wishes to express.Based on the framework of the Rational Speech Acts model, we quantify the utility of producing a marker based on the information-theoretic measure of surprisal, the cost of production, and a bias to maintain uniform information density throughout the utterance.Experiments based on the Penn Discourse Treebank show that our approach outperforms stateof-the-art approaches, while giving an explanatory account of the speaker's choice.1 'Speakers' and 'listeners' are interchangeably used with 'authors' and 'readers' in this article