Work

Alignment in Interactive Reference Production: Content Planning, Modifier Ordering, and Referential Overspecification

Year: 2012

Type: article

Abstract: Psycholinguistic studies often look at the production of referring expressions in interactive settings, but so far few referring expression generation algorithms have been developed that are sensitive to earlier references in an interaction. Rather, such algorithms tend to rely on domain-dependent preferences for both content selection and linguistic realization. We present three experiments showing that humans may opt for dispreferred attributes and dispreferred modifier orderings when these were primed in a preceding interaction (without speakers being consciously aware of this). In addition, we show that speakers are more likely to produce overspecified references, including dispreferred attributes (although minimal descriptions with preferred attributes would suffice), when these were similarly primed.

Source: Topics in Cognitive Science

DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01186.x

Authors: Martijn Goudbeek, Emiel Krahmer

Institution: Tilburg University

Language: English

Topic: Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: Radboud Universiteit, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

Award: G2045402190