TY - GEN
T1 - Topic Shift in Efficient Discourse Production
AU - Qian, Ting
AU - Jaeger, T. Florian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2011.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Speakers have been hypothesized to organize discourse content so as to achieve communicative efficiency. Previous work has focused on indirect tests of the hypothesis that speakers aim to keep per-word entropy constant across discourses to achieve communicative efficiency (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). We present novel and more direct evidence by examining the role of topic shift in discourse planning. If speakers aim for constant per-word entropy, they should encode less unconditional per-word entropy (as estimated based on only sentence-internal cues) following topic shifts, as there is less relevant context to condition on. Applying latent topic modeling to a large set of English texts, we find that speakers are indeed sensitive to the recent topic structure in the predicted way.
AB - Speakers have been hypothesized to organize discourse content so as to achieve communicative efficiency. Previous work has focused on indirect tests of the hypothesis that speakers aim to keep per-word entropy constant across discourses to achieve communicative efficiency (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). We present novel and more direct evidence by examining the role of topic shift in discourse planning. If speakers aim for constant per-word entropy, they should encode less unconditional per-word entropy (as estimated based on only sentence-internal cues) following topic shifts, as there is less relevant context to condition on. Applying latent topic modeling to a large set of English texts, we find that speakers are indeed sensitive to the recent topic structure in the predicted way.
KW - communicative efficiency
KW - discourse production
KW - topic shift
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139461600
T3 - Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011
SP - 3313
EP - 3318
BT - Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011
A2 - Carlson, Laura
A2 - Hoelscher, Christoph
A2 - Shipley, Thomas F.
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, CogSci 2011
Y2 - 20 July 2011 through 23 July 2011
ER -