Ambiguities in Task-oriented Dialogues

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are frequently strongly biased toward one meaning over another [see, e.g., Tanenhaus and Trueswell (1995)]. This interpretation bias influences listeners’ use of disambiguating prosody [Wales and Toner (1979)]. The current study investigated the effect on production. In experiment 1, the default interpretation of a heterogeneous set of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences was investigated in 40 participants, who completed a question-and-answer task designed to identify intended meaning without making participants aware of potential ambiguity. Results were that 90% of the participants interpreted 11 of the sentences in just one way. There was a weaker interpretation bias for the remaining 7 sentences. In experiment 2, ten speakers were provided with and taught the alternate meanings of the 18 sentences from experiment 1, and then asked to disambiguate the meanings using prosody. Temporal and F0 measures indicated that while all speakers differentiate...

2000

Speakers' prosodic marking of syntactic constituency is often measured in sentence reading tasks that lack realistic situational constraints on speaking. Results from such studies can be criticized because the pragmatic goals of readers differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation. On the other hand, recordings of unscripted speech do not readily yield the carefully controlled contrasts required for many research purposes. Our research employs a cooperative game task, in which two speakers use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate moves around gameboards. Results from a set of early versus late closure ambiguities suggest that speakers signal this syntactic difference with prosody even when the utterance context fully disambiguates the structure. Phonetic and phonological analyses show reliable prosodic disambiguation in speakers' productions; results of a comprehension task indicate that listeners can successfully use prosodic cues to categorize syntactically ambiguous fragments as portions of early or late closure utterances. for assistance with running subjects and measuring data.

Proceedings of SRSL 2009, the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language, 2009

Taking so-called split utterances as our point of departure, we argue that a new perspective on the major challenge of disambiguation becomes available, given a framework in which both parsing and generation incrementally involve the same mechanisms for constructing trees reflecting interpretation (Dynamic Syntax: ). With all dependencies, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, defined in terms of incremental progressive tree growth, the phenomenon of speaker/hearer role-switch emerges as an immediate consequence, with the potential for clarification, acknowledgement, correction, all available incrementally at any sub-sentential point in the interpretation process. Accordingly, at all intermediate points where interpretation of an utterance subpart is not fully determined for the hearer in context, uncertainty can be resolved immediately by suitable clarification/correction/repair/extension as an exchange between interlocutors. The result is a major check on the combinatorial explosion of alternative structures and interpretations at each choice point, and the basis for a model of how interpretation in context can be established without either party having to make assumptions about what information they and their interlocutor share in resolving ambiguities.

Journal of Memory and Language, 1997

Three experiments investigated the resolution of syntactic category ambiguities in a selfpaced reading paradigm, using moving window presentation. Sentences containing noun/verb homographs like duck (e.g., She saw her duck and chickens/stumble near the barn.) were embedded in short stories. The first experiment reports the collection of several types of norms to measure the degree to which each homograph was biased toward use as a noun or use as a verb, and the strength of the discourse bias for each item. The goal was to determine how probabilistic lexical bias and discourse bias influence the generation and selection of syntactic structure in the ambiguous region, and this was investigated by varying the length of the ambiguous region in Experiments 2-4. The data suggest that only probabilistic lexical bias influenced the generation of structure, while both lexical bias and discourse bias guided selection of the appropriate structure. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press Experimental investigations of language is disambiguated by the presence or absence of the word to. The verb form is ultimately processing have clearly demonstrated that readers and listeners process language incre-required in (1a), while the noun form is ultimately required in (1b). If an interpretation is mentally, developing interpretations as they read or hear each word rather than waiting formed as the words her duck are read, the wrong interpretation will inevitably be chosen until the end of the sentence (e.g., Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Frazier, 1987; Garrett, 1990; some of the time. Thus, some readers may experience a mild garden path when reading Marslen-Wilson, 1973; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995; Tanen-(1a) or (1b) because they initially assigned the wrong syntactic category to duck. haus & Trueswell, 1995; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977). However, human languages (1a) I saw her duck under the porch to eat are full of local ambiguities, and the advantage some potato chips. of immediate understanding comes at the cost (1b) I saw her duck under the porch eat of having to make syntactic and semantic some potato chips. commitments before all the ambiguities in the In psycholinguistic investigations of ambiinput have been resolved. For example, in (1) guity resolution, most research has concenit is not clear whether duck is a verb or a trated on either sense ambiguities (e.g., bank noun until four words downstream, where it can mean river bank or savings bank) or local structural ambiguities (e.g., The horse raced Address reprint requests to Julie E. Boland, who is in past the barn fell).

spl.uoregon.edu

Conflicting results from psycholinguistic studies highlight variability in the realization and use of prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguity. The present study used default interpretations of a variety of structurally ambiguous sentences to understand the extent to ...

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 1992

2003

In three experiments, a referential communication task was used to determine the conditions under which speakers produce and listeners use prosodic cues to distinguish alternative meanings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Analyses of the actions and utterances from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that Speakers chose to produce effective prosodic cues to disambiguation only when the referential scene provided support for both interpretations of the phrase. In Experiment 3, on-line measures of parsing commitments were obtained by recording the ListenerÕs eye movements to objects as the Speaker gave the instructions. Results supported the previous experiments but also showed that the SpeakerÕs prosody affected the ListenerÕs interpretation prior to the onset of the ambiguous phrase, thus demonstrating that prosodic cues not only influence initial parsing but can also be used to predict material which has yet to be spoken. The findings suggest that informative prosodic cues depend upon speakersÕ knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present.

Proceedings of the 32nd …, 2010

Interlocutors often omit important words during conversation, which can lead to miscommunication during ambiguous scenarios (Rayner, Carlson, & Frasyer, 1983). Haywood, Pickering and Branigan (2004) show that under ambiguous situations, listeners are highly sensitive to syntactic primes. The studies reported here evaluated the effects of linguistic and nonlinguistic cues to ambiguity. Experiment 1 implemented a syntactic prime and a visual mistake from a pseudo-confederate to promote disambiguation. Participants ...

Cognition, 2005

Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they did so equally regardless of whether they also were about to describe foils. This suggests that comprehension processes can sometimes detect linguistic-ambiguity before producing it. However, once produced, speakers consistently avoided using the same linguistically ambiguous expression again for a different meaning. This suggests that production processes can successfully detect linguistic-ambiguity after-the-fact. Speakers almost always avoided nonlinguistic-ambiguity. Thus, production processes are especially sensitive to nonlinguistic-but not linguistic-ambiguity, with the latter avoided consistently only once it is already articulated. q

Memory & Cognition, 2000