Abstract
The Uniform Information Density principle states that speakers plan their utterances to reduce fluctuations in the density of the information transmitted. In this paper, we test whether, and within which contextual units this principle holds in task-oriented dialogues. We show that there is evidence supporting the principle in written dialogues where participants play a cooperative reference game as well as in spoken dialogues involving instruction giving and following. Our study underlines the importance of identifying the relevant contextual components, showing that information content increases particularly within topically and referentially related contextual units.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Pages | 8271-8283 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Jaap Jumelet for a helpful discussion on neural language models, the anonymous EMNLP-2021 reviewers for their valuable comments, as well as the anonymous ACL-2021 reviewers for feedback that led to a considerable
improvement of the first version of this paper. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 819455).