Incremental prediction of sentence-final verbs: Humans versus machines

Alvin C. Grissom, Naho Orita, Jordan Boyd-Graber

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Verb prediction is important in human sentence processing and, practically, in simultaneous machine translation. In verb-final languages, speakers select the final verb before it is uttered, and listeners predict it before it is uttered. Simultaneous interpreters must do the same to translate in real-time. Motivated by the problem of SOV-SVO simultaneous machine translation, we provide a study of incremental verb prediction in verb-final languages. As a basis of comparison, we examine incremental verb prediction with human participants in a multiple choice setting using crowdsourcing to gain insight into incremental human performance in a constrained setting. We then examine a computational approach to incremental verb prediction using discriminative classification with shallow features. Both humans and machines predict verbs more accurately as more of a sentence becomes available, and case markers—when available—help humans and sometimes machines predict final verbs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCoNLL 2016 - 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages95-104
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626197
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2016 - Berlin, Germany
Duration: 2016 Aug 112016 Aug 12

Publication series

NameCoNLL 2016 - 20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings

Conference

Conference20th SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2016
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period16/8/1116/8/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Linguistics and Language

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