Analysing Human Strategies of Information Transmission as a Function of Discourse Context
Mario Giulianelli, Raquel Fernández · 2021
Speakers are thought to use rational information transmission strategies for efficient communication (Genzel and Charniak, 2002;Aylett and Turk, 2004;Jaeger and Levy, 2007).Previous work analysing these strategies in sentence production has failed to take into account how the information content of sentences varies as a function of the available discourse context.In this study, we estimate sentence information content within discourse context.We find that speakers transmit information at a stable rate-i.e., rationally-in English newspaper articles but that this rate decreases in spoken open domain and written task-oriented dialogues.We also observe that speakers' choices are not oriented towards local uniformity of information, which is another hypothesised rational strategy.We suggest that a more faithful model of communication should explicitly include production costs and goal-oriented rewards.