Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue

Mario Giulianelli, Arabella Sinclair, Raquel Fernández


Abstract
Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of lexicalised constructions—i.e., recurring multi-word units—in English open-domain spoken dialogues. We hypothesise that speakers use construction repetition to mitigate information rate, leading to an overall decrease in utterance information content over the course of a dialogue. We conduct a quantitative analysis, measuring the information content of constructions and that of their containing utterances, estimating information content with an adaptive neural language model. We observe that construction usage lowers the information content of utterances. This facilitating effect (i) increases throughout dialogues, (ii) is boosted by repetition, (iii) grows as a function of repetition frequency and density, and (iv) is stronger for repetitions of referential constructions.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
665–682
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.51
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mario Giulianelli, Arabella Sinclair, and Raquel Fernández. 2022. Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 665–682, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue (Giulianelli et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.51.pdf
Software:
 2022.aacl-main.51.Software.zip