Publications

• https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3310165/referential-entropy-influences-production-overspecifications

@miscellaneous{Tourtourietal2018b,
title = {Referential entropy influences the production of overspecifications},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Les Sikos and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3310165/referential-entropy-influences-production-overspecifications},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {10th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science, Communication, Pragmatics, and Theory of Mind (DuCog)},
publisher = {University of Zagreb},
address = {Dubrovnik, Croatia},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Contextual predictability variation affects phonological and phonetic structure. Reduction and expansion of acoustic-phonetic features is also characteristic of prosodic variability. In this study, we assess the impact of surprisal and prosodic structure on phonetic encoding, both independently of each other and in interaction. We model segmental duration, vowel space size and spectral characteristics of vowels and consonants as a function of surprisal as well as of syllable prominence, phrase boundary, and speech rate. Correlates of phonetic encoding density are extracted from a subset of the BonnTempo corpus for six languages: American English, Czech, Finnish, French, German, and Polish. Surprisal is estimated from segmental n-gram language models trained on large text corpora. Our findings are generally compatible with a weak version of Aylett and Turk’s Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis, suggesting that prosodic structure mediates between the requirements of efficient communication and the speech signal. However, this mediation is not perfect, as we found evidence for additional, direct effects of changes in surprisal on the phonetic structure of utterances. These effects appear to be stable across different speech rates.

• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025/full
• https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025

@article{Malisz2018,
title = {Dimensions of segmental variability: interaction of prosody and surprisal in six languages},
author = {Zofia Malisz and Erika Brandt and Bernd M{\"o}bius and Yoon Mi Oh and Bistra Andreeva},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025/full},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-07-20},
journal = {Frontiers in Communication / Language Sciences},
pages = {1-18},
volume = {3},
number = {25},
abstract = {Contextual predictability variation affects phonological and phonetic structure. Reduction and expansion of acoustic-phonetic features is also characteristic of prosodic variability. In this study, we assess the impact of surprisal and prosodic structure on phonetic encoding, both independently of each other and in interaction. We model segmental duration, vowel space size and spectral characteristics of vowels and consonants as a function of surprisal as well as of syllable prominence, phrase boundary, and speech rate. Correlates of phonetic encoding density are extracted from a subset of the BonnTempo corpus for six languages: American English, Czech, Finnish, French, German, and Polish. Surprisal is estimated from segmental n-gram language models trained on large text corpora. Our findings are generally compatible with a weak version of Aylett and Turk's Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis, suggesting that prosodic structure mediates between the requirements of efficient communication and the speech signal. However, this mediation is not perfect, as we found evidence for additional, direct effects of changes in surprisal on the phonetic structure of utterances. These effects appear to be stable across different speech rates.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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As technology and science permeate nearly all areas of life in modern times, there is a certain trend for standard dictionaries to bolster their technical and scientific vocabulary and to identify more components, for instance more combining forms, in technical terms and terminological phrases. In this paper it is argued that recently built diachronic corpora of scientific journal articles with robust linguistic and metadata-based features are important resources for complementing English corpus-based dictionaries and lexicographical resources for specialized languages. The Royal Society Corpus (RSC, ca. 9,800 digitized texts, 32 million tokens) in combination with the Scientific Text Corpus (SciTex, ca. 5,000 documents, 39 million tokens), as two recently created corpus resources, offer the possibility to provide a fuller picture of the development of specialized vocabulary and of the number of meanings that general and technical terms have accumulated during their history. They facilitate the systematic identification of lexemes with specific linguistic characteristics or from selected disciplines and fields, and allow us to gain a better understanding of the development of academic writing in English scientific periodicals across several centuries, from their beginnings to the present day.

• https://euralex.org/publications/using-diachronic-corpora-of-scientific-journal-articles-for-complementing-english-corpus-based-dictionaries-and-lexicographical-resources-for-specialized-languages/

@inproceedings{Menzel2017b,
title = {Using diachronic corpora of scientific journal articles for complementing English corpus-based dictionaries and lexicographical resources for specialized languages},
author = {Katrin Menzel},
url = {https://euralex.org/publications/using-diachronic-corpora-of-scientific-journal-articles-for-complementing-english-corpus-based-dictionaries-and-lexicographical-resources-for-specialized-languages/},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Proceedings of EURALEX2018},
isbn = {978-961-06-0097-8},
publisher = {Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts},
address = {Ljubljana, Slovenia},
abstract = {As technology and science permeate nearly all areas of life in modern times, there is a certain trend for standard dictionaries to bolster their technical and scientific vocabulary and to identify more components, for instance more combining forms, in technical terms and terminological phrases. In this paper it is argued that recently built diachronic corpora of scientific journal articles with robust linguistic and metadata-based features are important resources for complementing English corpus-based dictionaries and lexicographical resources for specialized languages. The Royal Society Corpus (RSC, ca. 9,800 digitized texts, 32 million tokens) in combination with the Scientific Text Corpus (SciTex, ca. 5,000 documents, 39 million tokens), as two recently created corpus resources, offer the possibility to provide a fuller picture of the development of specialized vocabulary and of the number of meanings that general and technical terms have accumulated during their history. They facilitate the systematic identification of lexemes with specific linguistic characteristics or from selected disciplines and fields, and allow us to gain a better understanding of the development of academic writing in English scientific periodicals across several centuries, from their beginnings to the present day.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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A number of different discourse connectives can be used to mark the same discourse relation, but it is unclear what factors affect connective choice. One recent account is the Rational Speech Acts theory, which predicts that speakers try to maximize the informativeness of an utterance such that the listener can interpret the intended meaning correctly. Existing prior work uses referential language games to test the rational account of speakers{‚} production of concrete meanings, such as identification of objects within a picture. Building on the same paradigm, we design a novel Discourse Continuation Game to investigate speakers{‚} production of abstract discourse relations. Experimental results reveal that speakers significantly prefer a more informative connective, in line with predictions of the RSA model.

• https://aclanthology.org/W18-2802
• https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-2802

@inproceedings{Yung2019b,
title = {Do speakers produce discourse connectives rationally?},
author = {Frances Pik Yu Yung and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W18-2802},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-2802},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing},
pages = {6-16},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Melbourne, Australia},
abstract = {A number of different discourse connectives can be used to mark the same discourse relation, but it is unclear what factors affect connective choice. One recent account is the Rational Speech Acts theory, which predicts that speakers try to maximize the informativeness of an utterance such that the listener can interpret the intended meaning correctly. Existing prior work uses referential language games to test the rational account of speakers{'} production of concrete meanings, such as identification of objects within a picture. Building on the same paradigm, we design a novel Discourse Continuation Game to investigate speakers{'} production of abstract discourse relations. Experimental results reveal that speakers significantly prefer a more informative connective, in line with predictions of the RSA model.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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In the present study, a corpus of short German sentences collected in a shadowing task was examined with respect to pitch accent realization. The pitch accents were parameterized with the PaIntE model, which describes the f0 contour of intonation events concerning their height, slope, and temporal alignment. Convergence was quantified as decrease in Euclidean distance, and hence increase in similarity, between the PaIntE parameter vectors. This was assessed for three stimulus types: natural speech, diphone based speech synthesis, or HMM based speech synthesis. The factors tested in the analysis were experimental phase – was the sentence uttered before or while shadowing the model, accent type – a distinction was made between prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents, and sex of speaker and shadowed model. For the natural and HMM stimuli, Euclidean distance decreased in the shadowing task. This convergence effect did not depend on the accent type. However, prenuclear pitch accents showed generally lower values in Euclidean distance than nuclear pitch accents. Whether the sex of the speaker and the shadowed model matched did not explain any variance in the data. For the diphone stimuli, no convergence of pitch accents was observed.

• https://publikationen.sulb.uni-saarland.de/handle/20.500.11880/29618
• https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-46

@inproceedings{Gessinger2018SP,
title = {Convergence of Pitch Accents in a Shadowing Task},
author = {Iona Gessinger and Antje Schweitzer and Bistra Andreeva and Eran Raveh and Bernd M{\"o}bius and Ingmar Steiner},
url = {https://publikationen.sulb.uni-saarland.de/handle/20.500.11880/29618},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-46},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody},
pages = {225-229},
publisher = {Speech Prosody Special Interest Group},
address = {Pozn{\'a}n, Poland},
abstract = {In the present study, a corpus of short German sentences collected in a shadowing task was examined with respect to pitch accent realization. The pitch accents were parameterized with the PaIntE model, which describes the f0 contour of intonation events concerning their height, slope, and temporal alignment. Convergence was quantified as decrease in Euclidean distance, and hence increase in similarity, between the PaIntE parameter vectors. This was assessed for three stimulus types: natural speech, diphone based speech synthesis, or HMM based speech synthesis. The factors tested in the analysis were experimental phase - was the sentence uttered before or while shadowing the model, accent type - a distinction was made between prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents, and sex of speaker and shadowed model. For the natural and HMM stimuli, Euclidean distance decreased in the shadowing task. This convergence effect did not depend on the accent type. However, prenuclear pitch accents showed generally lower values in Euclidean distance than nuclear pitch accents. Whether the sex of the speaker and the shadowed model matched did not explain any variance in the data. For the diphone stimuli, no convergence of pitch accents was observed.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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In this paper, we show how three often used and seemingly different discourse annotation frameworks – Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory – can be related by using a set of unifying dimensions. These dimensions are taken from the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations and combined with more fine-grained additional features from the frameworks themselves to yield a posited set of dimensions that can successfully map three frameworks. The resulting interface will allow researchers to find identical or at least closely related relations within sets of annotated corpora, even if they are annotated within different frameworks. Furthermore, we tested our unified dimension (UniDim) approach by comparing PDTB and RST annotations of identical newspaper texts and converting their original end label annotations of relations into the accompanying values per dimension. Subsequently, rates of overlap in the attributed values per dimension were analyzed. Results indicate that the proposed dimensions indeed create an interface that makes existing annotation systems “talk to each other.”

• https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cllt-2016-0078/html
• https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2016-0078

@article{Sanders2018,
title = {Unifying dimensions in coherence relations: How various annotation frameworks are related},
author = {Ted J. M. Sanders and Vera Demberg and Jet Hoek and Merel Scholman and Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Sandrine Zufferey and Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul},
url = {https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cllt-2016-0078/html},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2016-0078},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-05-22},
journal = {Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory},
abstract = {In this paper, we show how three often used and seemingly different discourse annotation frameworks – Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory – can be related by using a set of unifying dimensions. These dimensions are taken from the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations and combined with more fine-grained additional features from the frameworks themselves to yield a posited set of dimensions that can successfully map three frameworks. The resulting interface will allow researchers to find identical or at least closely related relations within sets of annotated corpora, even if they are annotated within different frameworks. Furthermore, we tested our unified dimension (UniDim) approach by comparing PDTB and RST annotations of identical newspaper texts and converting their original end label annotations of relations into the accompanying values per dimension. Subsequently, rates of overlap in the attributed values per dimension were analyzed. Results indicate that the proposed dimensions indeed create an interface that makes existing annotation systems “talk to each other.”},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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We present a new workflow to create components for the MaryTTS text-to-speech synthesis platform, which is popular with researchers and developers, extending it to support new languages and custom synthetic voices. This workflow replaces the previous toolkit with an efficient, flexible process that leverages modern build automation and cloud-hosted infrastructure. Moreover, it is compatible with the updated MaryTTS architecture, enabling new features and state-of-the-art paradigms such as synthesis based on deep neural networks (DNNs). Like MaryTTS itself, the new tools are free, open source software (FOSS), and promote the use of open data.

• 1045     (0.14MB)
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04787

@inproceedings{Steiner2018LREC,
title = {Creating New Language and Voice Components for the Updated MaryTTS Text-to-Speech Synthesis Platform},
author = {Ingmar Steiner and S{\'e}bastien Le Maguer},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04787},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-05-10},
booktitle = {11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)},
pages = {3171-3175},
address = {Miyazaki, Japan},
abstract = {We present a new workflow to create components for the MaryTTS text-to-speech synthesis platform, which is popular with researchers and developers, extending it to support new languages and custom synthetic voices. This workflow replaces the previous toolkit with an efficient, flexible process that leverages modern build automation and cloud-hosted infrastructure. Moreover, it is compatible with the updated MaryTTS architecture, enabling new features and state-of-the-art paradigms such as synthesis based on deep neural networks (DNNs). Like MaryTTS itself, the new tools are free, open source software (FOSS), and promote the use of open data.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Collocations have been identified as an interesting field to study the effects of frequency of occurrence in language and speech. We report results of a production experiment including a duration analysis based on the production of German collocations. The collocations occurred in a condition where the phrase was produced with a literal meaning and in another condition where it was idiomatic. A durational difference was found for the collocations, which were reduced in the idiomatic condition. This difference was also observed for the function word und (‘and’) in collocations like Mord und Totschlag (‘murder and manslaughter’). However, an analysis of the vowel /U/ of the function word did not show a durational difference. Some explanations as to why speakers showed different patterns of reduction (not all collocations were produced with a shorter duration in the idiomatic condition by all speakers) and why not all speakers use the durational cue (one out of eight speakers produced the conditions identically) are proposed.

• zimmerer_etal_sp2018-1     (0.21MB)
• https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/speechprosody_2018/zimmerer18_speechprosody.html
• https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-87

@inproceedings{Zimmerer2018SpPro,
title = {Idiomatic or literal? Production of collocations in German read speech},
author = {Frank Zimmerer and Erika Brandt and Bistra Andreeva and Bernd M{\"o}bius},
url = {https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/speechprosody_2018/zimmerer18_speechprosody.html},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-87},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Proc. Speech Prosody 2018},
pages = {428-432},
address = {Poznan},
abstract = {Collocations have been identified as an interesting field to study the effects of frequency of occurrence in language and speech. We report results of a production experiment including a duration analysis based on the production of German collocations. The collocations occurred in a condition where the phrase was produced with a literal meaning and in another condition where it was idiomatic. A durational difference was found for the collocations, which were reduced in the idiomatic condition. This difference was also observed for the function word und (‘and’) in collocations like Mord und Totschlag (‘murder and manslaughter’). However, an analysis of the vowel /U/ of the function word did not show a durational difference. Some explanations as to why speakers showed different patterns of reduction (not all collocations were produced with a shorter duration in the idiomatic condition by all speakers) and why not all speakers use the durational cue (one out of eight speakers produced the conditions identically) are proposed.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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This study investigated the influence of prosodic structure and information density (ID), defined as contextual predictability, on vowel-inherent spectral change (VISC). We extracted formant measurements from the onset and offset of the vowels of a large German corpus of newspaper read speech. Vector length (VL), the Euclidean distance between F1 and F2 trajectory, and F1 and F2 slope, formant deltas of onset and offset relative to vowel duration, were calculated as measures of formant change. ID factors were word frequency and phoneme-based surprisal measures, while the prosodic factors contained global and local articulation rate, primary lexical stress, and prosodic boundary. We expected that vowels increased in spectral change when they were difficult to predict from the context, or stood in low-frequency words while controlling for known effects of prosodic structure. The ID effects were assumed to be modulated by prosodic factors to a certain extent. We confirmed our hypotheses for VL, and found expected independent effects of prosody and ID on F1 slope and F2 slope.

• brandt_etal_sp2018     (0.31MB)
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325744530_Impact_of_prosodic_structure_and_information_density_on_dynamic_formant_trajectories_in_German
• https://doi.org/10.22028/D291-32050

@inproceedings{Brandt2018SpPro,
title = {Impact of prosodic structure and information density on dynamic formant trajectories in German},
author = {Erika Brandt and Frank Zimmerer and Bistra Andreeva and Bernd M{\"o}bius},
editor = {Katarzyna Klessa and Jolanta Bachan and Agnieszka Wagner and Maciej Karpiński and Daniel Śledziński},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325744530_Impact_of_prosodic_structure_and_information_density_on_dynamic_formant_trajectories_in_German},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.22028/D291-32050},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {Speech Prosody 2018},
issn = {2333-2042},
pages = {119-123},
publisher = {Speech Prosody Special Interest Group},
address = {Urbana},
abstract = {This study investigated the influence of prosodic structure and information density (ID), defined as contextual predictability, on vowel-inherent spectral change (VISC). We extracted formant measurements from the onset and offset of the vowels of a large German corpus of newspaper read speech. Vector length (VL), the Euclidean distance between F1 and F2 trajectory, and F1 and F2 slope, formant deltas of onset and offset relative to vowel duration, were calculated as measures of formant change. ID factors were word frequency and phoneme-based surprisal measures, while the prosodic factors contained global and local articulation rate, primary lexical stress, and prosodic boundary. We expected that vowels increased in spectral change when they were difficult to predict from the context, or stood in low-frequency words while controlling for known effects of prosodic structure. The ID effects were assumed to be modulated by prosodic factors to a certain extent. We confirmed our hypotheses for VL, and found expected independent effects of prosody and ID on F1 slope and F2 slope.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Variational encoder-decoders (VEDs) have shown promising results in dialogue generation. However, the latent variable distributions are usually approximated by a much simpler model than the powerful RNN structure used for encoding and decoding, yielding the KL-vanishing problem and inconsistent training objective. In this paper, we separate the training step into two phases: The first phase learns to autoencode discrete texts into continuous embeddings, from which the second phase learns to generalize latent representations by reconstructing the encoded embedding. In this case, latent variables are sampled by transforming Gaussian noise through multi-layer perceptrons and are trained with a separate VED model, which has the potential of realizing a much more flexible distribution. We compare our model with current popular models and the experiment demonstrates substantial improvement in both metric-based and human evaluations.

• 1802.02032     (0.54MB)
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02032

@inproceedings{Shen2018,
title = {Improving Variational Encoder-Decoders in Dialogue Generation},
author = {Xiaoyu Shen and Hui Su and Shuzi Niu and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02032},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-02-02},
publisher = {32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18)},
address = {New Orleans, USA},
abstract = {Variational encoder-decoders (VEDs) have shown promising results in dialogue generation. However, the latent variable distributions are usually approximated by a much simpler model than the powerful RNN structure used for encoding and decoding, yielding the KL-vanishing problem and inconsistent training objective. In this paper, we separate the training step into two phases: The first phase learns to autoencode discrete texts into continuous embeddings, from which the second phase learns to generalize latent representations by reconstructing the encoded embedding. In this case, latent variables are sampled by transforming Gaussian noise through multi-layer perceptrons and are trained with a separate VED model, which has the potential of realizing a much more flexible distribution. We compare our model with current popular models and the experiment demonstrates substantial improvement in both metric-based and human evaluations.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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We present an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system that generates audio and synchronized tongue motion directly from text. This is achieved by adapting a 3D model of the tongue surface to an articulatory dataset and training a statistical parametric speech synthesis system directly on the tongue model parameters. We evaluate the model at every step by comparing the spatial coordinates of predicted articulatory movements against the reference data. The results indicate a global mean Euclidean distance of less than 2.8 mm, and our approach can be adapted to add an articulatory modality to conventional TTS applications without the need for extra data.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09352

@article{Steiner2017TASLP,
title = {Synthesis of Tongue Motion and Acoustics from Text using a Multimodal Articulatory Database},
author = {Ingmar Steiner and S{\'e}bastien Le Maguer and Alexander Hewer},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09352},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing},
pages = {2351-2361},
volume = {25},
number = {12},
abstract = {We present an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system that generates audio and synchronized tongue motion directly from text. This is achieved by adapting a 3D model of the tongue surface to an articulatory dataset and training a statistical parametric speech synthesis system directly on the tongue model parameters. We evaluate the model at every step by comparing the spatial coordinates of predicted articulatory movements against the reference data. The results indicate a global mean Euclidean distance of less than 2.8 mm, and our approach can be adapted to add an articulatory modality to conventional TTS applications without the need for extra data.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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• http://www.cys.cic.ipn.mx/ojs/index.php/CyS/article/view/2865

@article{Fischer2017,
title = {Beyond Pairwise Similarity: Quantifying and Characterizing Linguistic Similarity between Groups of Languages by MDL},
author = {Andrea Fischer and Jilles Vreeken and Dietrich Klakow},
url = {http://www.cys.cic.ipn.mx/ojs/index.php/CyS/article/view/2865},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Computación y Systems},
pages = {829-839},
volume = {21},
number = {4},
abstract = {

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• olinco-2016-proceedings     (4.67MB)

@inproceedings{Klára2017,
title = {Lexical and orthographic distances between Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian: A comparative analysis of the most frequent nouns},
author = {Kl{\'a}ra J{\'a}grov{\'a} and Irina Stenger and Roland Marti and Tania Avgustinova},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Joseph Emonds & Mark{\'e}ta Janebov{\'a} (eds.), Language Use and Linguistic Structure. Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2016},
pages = {401–416},
address = {Olomouc: Palacký University},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/modeling-the-impact-of-orthographic-coding-on-czechpolish-and-bulgarianrussian-reading-intercomprehension/363BEB5C556DFBDAC7FEED0AE06B06AA

@article{Stenger2017b,
title = {Modeling the Impact of Orthographic Coding on Czech-Polish and Bulgarian-Russian Reading Intercomprehension},
author = {Irina Stenger and Kl{\'a}ra J{\'a}grov{\'a} and Andrea Fischer and Tania Avgustinova and Dietrich Klakow and Roland Marti},
url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/modeling-the-impact-of-orthographic-coding-on-czechpolish-and-bulgarianrussian-reading-intercomprehension/363BEB5C556DFBDAC7FEED0AE06B06AA},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Nordic Journal of Linguistic},
pages = {175-199},
volume = {40},
number = {2},
abstract = {

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In this article we validate two measuring methods: Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal as potential predictors of success in reading intercomprehension. We investigate to what extent orthographic distances between Russian and other East Slavic (Ukrainian, Belarusian) and South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian) languages found by means of the Levenshtein algorithm and word adaptation surprisal correlate with comprehension of unknown Slavic languages on the basis of data obtained from Russian native speakers in online free translation task experiments. We try to find an answer to the following question: Can measuring methods such as Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal be considered as a good approximation of orthographic intelligibility of unknown Slavic languages using the Cyrillic script?

• dialogue2017_v1     (6.95MB)
• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Levenshtein-Distance-anD-WorD-aDaptation-surprisaL-Distance/6103d388cb0398b89dec8ca36ec0be025bb6dea2

@inproceedings{Stenger2017,
title = {Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal as methods of measuring mutual intelligibility in reading comprehension of Slavic languages},
author = {Irina Stenger and Tania Avgustinova and Roland Marti},
url = {https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Levenshtein-Distance-anD-WorD-aDaptation-surprisaL-Distance/6103d388cb0398b89dec8ca36ec0be025bb6dea2},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: International Conference "Dialogue 2017"},
pages = {304-317},
abstract = {In this article we validate two measuring methods: Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal as potential predictors of success in reading intercomprehension. We investigate to what extent orthographic distances between Russian and other East Slavic (Ukrainian, Belarusian) and South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian) languages found by means of the Levenshtein algorithm and word adaptation surprisal correlate with comprehension of unknown Slavic languages on the basis of data obtained from Russian native speakers in online free translation task experiments. We try to find an answer to the following question: Can measuring methods such as Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal be considered as a good approximation of orthographic intelligibility of unknown Slavic languages using the Cyrillic script?},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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@article{Jágrová2017,
title = {POLSKI TO JEZYK NIESKOMPLIKOWANY? Theoretische und praktische Interkomprehension der 100 h{\"a}ufigsten polnischen Substantive},
author = {Kl{\'a}ra J{\'a}grov{\'a} and Irina Stenger and Tania Avgustinova and Roland Marti},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {In Polnisch in Deutschland. Zeitschrift der Bundesvereinigung der Polnischlehrkr{\"a}fte},
pages = {5-19},
volume = {4/2016},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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In situated communication, reference can be established with expressions conveying either precise (Minimally-Specified, MS) or redundant (Over-Specified, OS) information. For example, while in Figure 1, “Find the blue ball” identifies exactly one object in all panels, only in the top displays is the adjective required. There is no consensus, however, concerning whether OS hinders processing (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2011) or not (e.g., Tourtouri et al., 2015). Additionally, as incoming words incrementally restrict the referential domain, they contribute to the reduction of uncertainty regarding the target (i.e., referential entropy). Depending on the distribution of objects, the same utterance results in different entropy reduction profiles: “blue” reduces entropy by 1.58 bits in the right panels, and by .58 bits in the left ones, while “ball” reduces entropy by 1 and 2 bits, respectively. Thus, the adjective modulates the distribution of entropy reduction, resulting in uniform (UR) or non-uniform (NR) reduction profiles. This study seeks to establish whether referential processing is facilitated: a) by the use of redundant pre-nominal modification (OS), b) by the uniform reduction of entropy (cf. Jaeger, 2010), and c) when these two factors interact. Results from inspection probabilities and the Index of Cognitive Activity — a pupillometric measure of cognitive workload (Demberg & Sayeed, 2016) — indicate that processing was facilitated for both OS and UR, while fixation probabilities show a greater advantage for OS-UR. In conclusion, efficient processing is determined by both informativity of the reference and the rate of entropy reduction.

• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322556329_The_interplay_of_specificity_and_referential_entropy_reduction_in_situated_communication

@inproceedings{Tourtourietal2017d,
title = {The interplay of specificity and referential entropy reduction in situated communication},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Francesca Delogu and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322556329_The_interplay_of_specificity_and_referential_entropy_reduction_in_situated_communication},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {10th Annual Embodied and Situated Language (ESLP) Conference},
publisher = {Higher School of Economics},
address = {Moscow, Russia},
abstract = {In situated communication, reference can be established with expressions conveying either precise (Minimally-Specified, MS) or redundant (Over-Specified, OS) information. For example, while in Figure 1, “Find the blue ball” identifies exactly one object in all panels, only in the top displays is the adjective required. There is no consensus, however, concerning whether OS hinders processing (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2011) or not (e.g., Tourtouri et al., 2015). Additionally, as incoming words incrementally restrict the referential domain, they contribute to the reduction of uncertainty regarding the target (i.e., referential entropy). Depending on the distribution of objects, the same utterance results in different entropy reduction profiles: “blue” reduces entropy by 1.58 bits in the right panels, and by .58 bits in the left ones, while “ball” reduces entropy by 1 and 2 bits, respectively. Thus, the adjective modulates the distribution of entropy reduction, resulting in uniform (UR) or non-uniform (NR) reduction profiles. This study seeks to establish whether referential processing is facilitated: a) by the use of redundant pre-nominal modification (OS), b) by the uniform reduction of entropy (cf. Jaeger, 2010), and c) when these two factors interact. Results from inspection probabilities and the Index of Cognitive Activity — a pupillometric measure of cognitive workload (Demberg & Sayeed, 2016) — indicate that processing was facilitated for both OS and UR, while fixation probabilities show a greater advantage for OS-UR. In conclusion, efficient processing is determined by both informativity of the reference and the rate of entropy reduction.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Over-specifications (OS) are expressions that provide more information than minimally required for the identification of a referent, thereby violating Grice’s 2nd Quantity Maxim [1]. In Figure 1, for example, the expression “Find the blue ball” identifies exactly one object in all panels, but only in the top displays is the adjective required to disambiguate the target. In recent years, psycholinguistic research has tried to test the empirical validity of Grice’s Maxim, resulting in conflicting findings. That is, there is evidence both that OS hinders [2,3] and that it facilitates [4,5] referential processing. The current study investigates the influence of OS on visually-situated processing, when the context allows both a minimally-specified (MS) and an OS interpretation of pre-nominal adjectives (cf. Fig.1). Additionally, as the utterance unfolds over time, incoming words incrementally restrict the search space. In this sense, information on “blue” and “ball” is determined not only by their probability to occur in this context, but also by the amount of uncertainty about the target they reduce — in information theoretic terms [6]. A greater reduction of the referential set size on the adjective (A&C) results in a more uniform reduction profile (Uniform Reduction, UR), as the adjective reduces entropy by 1.58 bits and the noun by 1 bit. On the other hand, a moderate reduction of the set size on the adjective (B&D) results in a less uniform reduction profile (Nonuniform Reduction, NR): the adjective reduces entropy by .58 bits and the noun by 2 bits. This study examines whether, above and beyond any effects of specificity, the rate at which incoming words reduce visual entropy also affects referential processing.

• TourtouriDeloguCrocker     (0.54MB)
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322571202_Over-specification_Uniform_Reduction_of_Visual_Entropy_Facilitate_Referential_Processing

@inproceedings{Tourtourietal2017b,
title = {Overspecification and uniform reduction of visual entropy facilitate referential processing},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Francesca Delogu and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322571202_Over-specification_Uniform_Reduction_of_Visual_Entropy_Facilitate_Referential_Processing},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {XPrag2017},
address = {Cologne, Germany},
abstract = {Over-specifications (OS) are expressions that provide more information than minimally required for the identification of a referent, thereby violating Grice’s 2nd Quantity Maxim [1]. In Figure 1, for example, the expression “Find the blue ball” identifies exactly one object in all panels, but only in the top displays is the adjective required to disambiguate the target. In recent years, psycholinguistic research has tried to test the empirical validity of Grice’s Maxim, resulting in conflicting findings. That is, there is evidence both that OS hinders [2,3] and that it facilitates [4,5] referential processing. The current study investigates the influence of OS on visually-situated processing, when the context allows both a minimally-specified (MS) and an OS interpretation of pre-nominal adjectives (cf. Fig.1). Additionally, as the utterance unfolds over time, incoming words incrementally restrict the search space. In this sense, information on “blue” and “ball” is determined not only by their probability to occur in this context, but also by the amount of uncertainty about the target they reduce — in information theoretic terms [6]. A greater reduction of the referential set size on the adjective (A&C) results in a more uniform reduction profile (Uniform Reduction, UR), as the adjective reduces entropy by 1.58 bits and the noun by 1 bit. On the other hand, a moderate reduction of the set size on the adjective (B&D) results in a less uniform reduction profile (Nonuniform Reduction, NR): the adjective reduces entropy by .58 bits and the noun by 2 bits. This study examines whether, above and beyond any effects of specificity, the rate at which incoming words reduce visual entropy also affects referential processing.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Behavioral studies demonstrate the influence of speaker gaze in visually-situated spoken language comprehension. We present an ERP experiment examining the influence of speaker’s gaze congruency on listeners’ comprehension of referential expressions related to a shared visual scene. We demonstrate that listeners exploit speakers’ gaze toward objects in order to form sentence continuation expectations: Compared to a congruent gaze condition, we observe an increased N400 when (a) the lack of gaze (neutral) does not allow for upcoming noun prediction, and (b) when the noun violates gaze-driven expectations (incongruent). The later also results in a late (sustained) positivity, reflecting the need to update the assumed situation model. We take the combination of the N400 and late positivity as evidence that speaker gaze influences both lexical retrieval and integration processes, respectively (Brouwer et al., in press). Moreover, speaker gaze is interpreted as reflecting referential intentions (Staudte & Crocker, 2011).

• CogSci2017     (0.24MB)
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325969989_The_Influence_of_Speaker%27s_Gaze_on_Sentence_Comprehension_An_ERP_Investigation

@inproceedings{Jachmann2017,
title = {The Influence of Speaker's Gaze on Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Investigation},
author = {Torsten Jachmann and Heiner Drenhaus and Maria Staudte and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325969989_The_Influence_of_Speaker%27s_Gaze_on_Sentence_Comprehension_An_ERP_Investigation},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
pages = {2261-2266},
abstract = {Behavioral studies demonstrate the influence of speaker gaze in visually-situated spoken language comprehension. We present an ERP experiment examining the influence of speaker’s gaze congruency on listeners’ comprehension of referential expressions related to a shared visual scene. We demonstrate that listeners exploit speakers’ gaze toward objects in order to form sentence continuation expectations: Compared to a congruent gaze condition, we observe an increased N400 when (a) the lack of gaze (neutral) does not allow for upcoming noun prediction, and (b) when the noun violates gaze-driven expectations (incongruent). The later also results in a late (sustained) positivity, reflecting the need to update the assumed situation model. We take the combination of the N400 and late positivity as evidence that speaker gaze influences both lexical retrieval and integration processes, respectively (Brouwer et al., in press). Moreover, speaker gaze is interpreted as reflecting referential intentions (Staudte & Crocker, 2011).},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using eitheranexpression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, along-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerningwhether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evidence from an eyetrackingexperiment recordingfixations as well asthe Index of Cognitive Activity –a novel measure of cognitive workload –supporting the view that over-specifications facilitate processing. We further present originalevidence that, above and beyond the effect of specificity,referring expressions thatuniformly reduce referential entropyalso benefitprocessing

• Tourtouri, Delogu, Crocker - 2017 - Specificity and Entropy Reduction in situated referential processing     (2.47MB)
• https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3309545/specificity-and-entropy-reduction-situated-referential-processing

@inproceedings{Tourtouri2017,
title = {Specificity and entropy reduction in situated referential processing},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Francesca Delogu and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3309545/specificity-and-entropy-reduction-situated-referential-processing},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
address = {Austin, Texas, USA},
abstract = {In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using eitheranexpression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, along-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerningwhether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evidence from an eyetrackingexperiment recordingfixations as well asthe Index of Cognitive Activity –a novel measure of cognitive workload –supporting the view that over-specifications facilitate processing. We further present originalevidence that, above and beyond the effect of specificity,referring expressions thatuniformly reduce referential entropyalso benefitprocessing},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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