Informatisches Kolloquium Sommersemester 2006

Montag, 12. Juni 2006
um 17 Uhr c.t. Vogt-Kölln-Straße 30 Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal Gebäude B

Dr. Frank Keller
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

Probabilistic Models of Adaptation in Human Parsing

Experimental research in psycholinguistics has demonstrated a parallelism effect in coordination: speakers are faster at processing the second conjunct of a coordinate structure if it has the same internal structure as the first conjunct. We show that this phenomenon can be explained by the prevalence of parallel structures in corpus data. We demonstrate that parallelism is not limited to coordination, but also applies to arbitrary syntactic configurations, and even to documents.

We then describe a method for incorporating priming into an incremental probabilistic parser. Three models are compared, which involve priming of rules between sentences, within sentences, and within coordinate structures. These models simulate the reading time advantage for parallel structures found in human data, and also yield a small increase in overall parsing accuracy.

Taken together, the results from corpus studies and modeling experiments indicate that the parallelism effect is an instance of a general syntactic priming mechanism in human language processing, rather than being due to a specialized copying strategy.

Joint work with Amit Dubey and Patrick Sturt.

Kontakt

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Menzel
Telefon +49 40 42883 2435