Papers by Edward Gibson
Resource-Rational Noisy-Channel Language Processing: Testing the Effect of Algorithmic Constraints on Inferences (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a fundamental question in psycholinguistics is how comprehenders form interpretations of utterances that they hear or see. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a language model as a prior and an error model to encode likelihoods to perform incremental and approximate probabilistic inferences over intended sentences and production errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures previously established patterns in human sentence processing, and trade-off between human-like noisy-channel inferences and computational resources falls out of the model. |
The Natural Stories Corpus (L18-1)
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Richard Futrell, Edward Gibson, Harry J. Tily, Idan Blank, Anastasia Vishnevetsky, Steven Piantadosi, Evelina Fedorenko
| Challenge: | Existing corpora of naturalistic text do not contain the low-frequency syntactic constructions needed to distinguish between theories. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare models of language processing by comparing their ability to predict behavioral and neural measures of processing difficulty to corpora of naturalistic text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains low-frequency syntactic constructions while sounding fluent to native speakers. |
A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication . a long-standing challenge for artificial language models is to capture pragmatics . |
| Approach: | They compare language models and humans on seven pragmatic phenomena using curated English materials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high accuracy and matches human error patterns . the results suggest pragmatic behaviors can emerge in models without explicit representations of mental states . |