Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs: Humans versus Machines
Alvin Grissom, Naho Orita, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber · 2016
Verb prediction is important in human sentence processing and, practically, in simultaneous machine translation.In verb-final languages, speakers select the final verb before it is uttered, and listeners predict it before it is uttered.Simultaneous interpreters must do the same to translate in real-time.Motivated by the problem of SOV-SVO simultaneous machine translation, we provide a study of incremental verb prediction in verb-final languages.As a basis of comparison, we examine incremental verb prediction with human participants in a multiple choice setting using crowdsourcing to gain insight into incremental human performance in a constrained setting.We then examine a computational approach to incremental verb prediction using discriminative classification with shallow features.Both humans and machines predict verbs more accurately as more of a sentence becomes available, and case markers-when available-help humans and sometimes machines predict final verbs.