Effects of Cognitive Effort on the Resolution of Overspecified Descriptions

Studies in referring expression generation (REG) have shown different effects of referential overspecification on the resolution of certain descriptions. To further investigate effects of this kind, this article reports two eye-tracking experiments that measure the time required to recognize target...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ivandré Paraboni, Alex Gwo Jen Lan, Matheus Mendes de Sant'Ana, Flávio Luiz Coutinho
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: The MIT Press 2017-03-01
Series:Computational Linguistics
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00288
Description
Summary:Studies in referring expression generation (REG) have shown different effects of referential overspecification on the resolution of certain descriptions. To further investigate effects of this kind, this article reports two eye-tracking experiments that measure the time required to recognize target objects based on different kinds of information. Results suggest that referential overspecification may be either helpful or detrimental to identification depending on the kind of information that is actually overspecified, an insight that may be useful for the design of more informed hearer-oriented REG algorithms.
ISSN:1530-9312