Paper Info
Title
Lossy-Context Surprisal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing.
Abstract
A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy-context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context-that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language-dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory-based theories, can be derived from lossy-context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1111/cogs.12814
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Psycholinguistics,Sentence processing,Information theory
Journal
44
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3.0
0364-0213
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
richard futrell11511.08
Edward Gibson22010.72
Roger Levy399667.40