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A probabilistic earley parser as a psycholinguistic model

Published: 02 June 2001 Publication History

Abstract

In human sentence processing, cognitive load can be defined many ways. This report considers a definition of cognitive load in terms of the total probability of structural options that have been disconfirmed at some point in a sentence: the surprisal of word wi given its prefix wo...i-1 on a phrase-structural language model. These loads can be efficiently calculated using a probabilistic Earley parser (Stolcke, 1995) which is interpreted as generating predictions about reading time on a word-by-word basis. Under grammatical assumptions supported by corpus-frequency data, the operation of Stolcke's probabilistic Earley parser correctly predicts processing phenomena associated with garden path structural ambiguity and with the subject/object relative asymmetry.

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NAACL '01: Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language technologies
June 2001
293 pages

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Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

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Published: 02 June 2001

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