The Linearity of the Effect of Surprisal on Reading Times across Languages (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a large amount of insight into human language processing can be gleaned by studying word-by-word processing difficulty. |
| Approach: | They extend the study by examining eyetracking corpora of seven languages . they find evidence for superlinearity in some languages, but highly sensitive to language models . |
| Outcome: | The study extends existing studies on english to Danish, Dutch, English, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian. |
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Eleftheria Tsipidi, Samuel Kiegeland, Francesco Ignazio Re, Tianyang Xu, Mario Giulianelli, Karolina Stanczak, Ryan Cotterell
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times. |
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| Challenge: | a prior work using surprisal only considered within-sentence context, using n-grams, neural language models, or syntactic structure as conditioning context. |
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