Related papers: You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorabi…
When we experience an event, it feels like our previous experiences, our interpretations of that event (e.g., aesthetics, emotions), and our current state will determine how we will remember it. However, recent work has revealed a strong…
For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
The pixels in an image, and the objects, scenes, and actions that they compose, determine whether an image will be memorable or forgettable. While memorability varies by image, it is largely independent of an individual observer. Observer…
When we encounter a new person or place, we may easily encode it into our memories, or we may quickly forget it. Recent work finds that this likelihood of encoding a given entity - memorability - is highly consistent across viewers and…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
Using English words as passwords have been a popular topic in the last few years. The following article discusses a study to compare self-selection of the system-generated words for recognition and self-generated words for recall for nouns…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
Our aural experience plays an integral role in the perception and memory of the events in our lives. Some of the sounds we encounter throughout the day stay lodged in our minds more easily than others; these, in turn, may serve as powerful…
Phrases are essential to understand the core concepts in conversations. However, due to their rare occurrence in training data, correct translation of phrases is challenging in speech translation tasks. In this paper, we propose a phrase…
Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it…
Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…
While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…
Little research has explored how information engagement (IE), the degree to which individuals interact with and use information in a manner that manifests cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively. This study explored the impact of…
The extent to which men and women use language differently has been questioned previously. Finding clear and consistent gender differences in language is not conclusive in general, and the research is heavily influenced by the context and…
Studies across many disciplines have shown that lexical choice can affect audience perception. For example, how users describe themselves in a social media profile can affect their perceived socio-economic status. However, we lack general…
Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…
Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to…