Abstract
Discourse relations can either be explicitly marked by discourse connectives (DCs), such as therefore and but, or implicitly conveyed in natural language utterances. How speakers choose between the two options is a question that is not well understood. In this study, we propose a psycholinguistic model that predicts whether or not speakers will produce an explicit marker given the discourse relation they wish to express. Our model is based on two information-theoretic frameworks: (1) the Rational Speech Acts model, which models the pragmatic interaction between language production and interpretation by Bayesian inference, and (2) the Uniform Information Density theory, which advocates that speakers adjust linguistic redundancy to maintain a uniform rate of information transmission. Specifically, our model quantifies the utility of using or omitting a DC based on the expected surprisal of comprehension, cost of production, and availability of other signals in the rest of the utterance. Experiments based on the Penn Discourse Treebank show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art performance at predicting the presence of DCs (Patterson and Kehler, 2013), in addition to giving an explanatory account of the speaker’s choice.
Highlights
Speakers or authors produce informative utterances such that listeners or readers can understand the intended message.1 Grice’s Maxim of Quantity states that human speakers communicate by being as informative as required, but no more (Grice, 1975)
We have presented a language production model that predicts whether speakers will choose to use an explicit discourse connectives (DCs) or not given the discourse relation they want to express
The option of DC marking is a subtle preference in the absence of other grammatical constraints, our proposed marking model tackles the option as a rational preference by the speaker
Summary
Speakers or authors produce informative utterances such that listeners or readers can understand the intended message. Grice’s Maxim of Quantity states that human speakers communicate by being as informative as required, but no more (Grice, 1975). Speakers or authors produce informative utterances such that listeners or readers can understand the intended message.. If a speaker always tries to provide as much information as possible, the resulting utterance could become excessively long and tedious. Such utterance takes effort for the speaker to produce, and contains redundant information that is not necessary for the listener. Discourse relations are relations between unit of texts (known as arguments) that make a document coherent. These relations can be explicitly marked in the surface text or inferred by the readers, as shown in Examples 1a to 1c
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