We are delighted to present you with this volume containing the papers accepted for presentation at the SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language, held in Athens, Greece, on March 30th 2009. We demonstrate that lexical and syntactic repetition are reliable and computationally exploitable predictors of task success. We argue that the repetition tendency relevant for the high-level alignment of situation models is based on slow adaptation rather than short-term priming. We show this effect in a corpus of task-oriented dialogue, where we find a positive correlation of long-term adaptation and a quantifiable task success measure. (b) The Interactive Alignment Model predicts linguistic adaptation to be correlated with task success.
We find within- and between-speaker priming in a corpus of spontaneous conversations, but stronger priming in task-oriented dialogue. (a) Under a rational perspective, we expect increased repetition in task-oriented dialogue compared to spontaneous conversation.
#OMNIGRAFFLE PRO 5.4.3 FULL#
In this paper, we develop two predictions arising from the theory, along with two methods to quantify the known structural priming effects in the full inventory of syntactic choices found in text and speech corpora. The Interactive Alignment Model (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) suggests that this convergence is the result of an interactive alignment process, which is based on mechanistic repetition at a number of linguistic levels. Task-solving in dialogue depends on the convergence of the situation models held by the dialogue partners. They thus contribute to answering the ultimate question of why grammars of language are the way they are. Overall, the studies this thesis report on support the Verb Anchor hypothesis and provide a partial answer to the question why verbs with similar meanings tend to occur in similar syntactic contexts.
Second, two sets of corpus analyses investigate whether an anchor that results from repeated experience of association between verb and syntactic frame (the typical anchor of a frame) influences the syntactic realization of verbs that are semantically similar to the anchor and have similar syntactic options.
First, four syntactic priming experiments investigate whether an anchor formed via speakers’ immediate sentence experience (the recent anchor of a frame) affects syntactic frame selection in subsequent sentence production. I examine the Verb Anchor Hypothesis in two related but separate contexts of use. More precisely, the more semantically similar a verb is to the anchor, the more likely speakers are to choose the same frame as the frame associated with the anchor. I predict that high semantic similarity between verbs leads to an increase in the likelihood of speakers’ choosing the same syntactic frame across sentences. Building on the assumption that this correspondence is due to the fact that speakers’ prior experience with linguistic structures affects their subsequent behavior (priming), I propose the Verb Anchor hypothesis that holds that experience with a sentence leads to a cognitive association between the sentence’s verb and the syntactic frame the sentence instantiates and that when this association is strong, the verb serves as an ‘anchor’ of the frame. This dissertation explores the cognitive underpinnings of the linguistic observation that there is a strong correspondence between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic contexts in which they occur.
0 kommentar(er)
