Production of referring expressions (the dog, it, Snoopy) is a complex process regulated by a combination of linguistic and cognitive constraints. In this paper, we explore the impact of world knowledge on the types of references speakers produce, focusing on predictability of event progressions. We argue that speakers are more likely to use a full noun phrase rather than drop the subject or use a pronoun when they describe an event progression they find surprising. In order to avoid the influence of distributional properties of event descriptions, we created an artificial world and trained subjects to recognize typical collision-event progressions within. Speakers then described novel scenes, which either conformed to their expectations or violated them, in a free production experiment. The results reveal that unpredictable event progressions lead to a more frequent production of full noun phrases, in contrast to reduced linguistic expressions (pronouns and null subjects). We conclude that speakers choose more informative descriptions to talk about surprising events.

Speakers Use More Informative Referring Expressions to Describe Surprising Events


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Poster Session 3 -  E: Linguistics

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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Speakers Use More Informative Referring Expressions to Describe Surprising Events

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