Related papers: Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate i…
A key function of the lexicon is to express novel concepts as they emerge over time through a process known as lexicalization. The most common lexicalization strategies are the reuse and combination of existing words, but they have…
Speakers often have multiple ways to express the same meaning. The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis suggests that speakers exploit this variability to maintain a consistent rate of information transmission during language…
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 uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…
The wave of pre-training language models has been continuously improving the quality of the machine-generated conversations, however, some of the generated responses still suffer from excessive repetition, sometimes repeating words from…
Conversation systems accommodate diverse users with unique personalities and distinct writing styles. Within the domain of multi-turn dialogue modeling, this work studies the impact of varied utterance lengths on the quality of subsequent…
Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…
Recent research on conversational search highlights the importance of mixed-initiative in conversations. To enable mixed-initiative, the system should be able to ask clarifying questions to the user. However, the ability of the underlying…
Reduced articulatory precision is common in speech, but for dialog its acoustic properties and pragmatic functions have been little studied. We here try to remedy this gap. This technical report contains content that was omitted from the…
Measuring the quality of public deliberation requires evaluating not only civility or argument structure, but also the informational progress of a conversation. We introduce a framework for Conversational Information Gain (CIG) that…
Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening…
We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This…
Repeated reading (RR) helps learners, who have little to no experience with reading fluently to gain confidence, speed and process words automatically. The benefits of repeated readings include helping all learners with fact recall, aiding…