Coreference-aware Surprisal Predicts Brain Response

Evan Jaffe, Byung-Doh Oh, William Schuler


Abstract
Recent evidence supports a role for coreference processing in guiding human expectations about upcoming words during reading, based on covariation between reading times and word surprisal estimated by a coreference-aware semantic processing model (Jaffe et al. 2020).The present study reproduces and elaborates on this finding by (1) enabling the parser to process subword information that might better approximate human morphological knowledge, and (2) extending evaluation of coreference effects from self-paced reading to human brain imaging data. Results show that an expectation-based processing effect of coreference is still evident even in the presence of the stronger psycholinguistic baseline provided by the subword model, and that the coreference effect is observed in both self-paced reading and fMRI data, providing evidence of the effect’s robustness.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.285
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3351–3356
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.285
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.285
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Evan Jaffe, Byung-Doh Oh, and William Schuler. 2021. Coreference-aware Surprisal Predicts Brain Response. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3351–3356, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coreference-aware Surprisal Predicts Brain Response (Jaffe et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.285.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.285.mp4
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