Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disambiguating Information in Speech and Context

语言是人类交流的重要工具，但在日常对话中，人类经常需要在可能存在多种潜在含义的情况下驾驭模糊性。听者如何成功地理解说话者的意思？一种直觉是，听者利用上下文（前一段对话）和韵律（讲话的旋律和节奏元素）中的线索来解读意图。本研究调查了这两种信息源之间的关系，询问是否(i)语境和韵律提供了两种不同的信息流，或者（ii）语境是主要的信息来源，而韵律反映了语境。为了更好地理解上下文和韵律如何帮助说话者解决歧义，本博士论文研究利用了最近才获得的大量日常语言使用数据。具体来说，这个项目建立了一个独特的自然歧义语料库，捕捉人们真正说过的经过证实的和不同的句子。首先，研究人员从公共广播和电视的对话录音档案中搜索，找到潜在的歧义实例，然后用于创建歧义语料库，保留每个案例的原始上下文和包含韵律的录音。对于每种情况，人类注释者判断他们认为说话者的意思。判决书只适用于笔录，只适用于记录，适用于上下文的笔录，适用于上下文的记录。通过比较人们的解读，研究人员比较了语境和韵律在这些解读中的作用。为了进一步研究关于上下文和韵律如何共同解决日常对话中歧义的假设，研究小组建立了一个计算认知模型，模拟人们如何解释歧义语料库中识别的歧义话语，给定这些信息源。为了评估该模型编码的关于上下文和韵律的假设，进行了后续实验，以测试关于上下文、韵律及其相互作用如何影响解释的特定模型预测。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Language serves as a remarkable tool for human communication, but in everyday conversations, humans often need to navigate ambiguity when multiple potential meanings are possible. How do listeners successfully understand what a speaker meant? One intuition is that listeners use clues from context (the preceding conversation) and prosody (the melodic and rhythmic elements of speech) to decipher the intended meaning. This study investigates the relationship between these two information sources, asking whether (i) context and prosody provide two different streams of information, or if (ii) context is the main source of information while prosody reflects the context. To better understand how context and prosody help speakers resolve ambiguity, this doctoral dissertation research takes advantage of the large-scale amounts of data on everyday language use that have only recently become available. Specifically, this project builds a unique corpus of naturalistic ambiguity that captures the attested and diverse sentences people really say. First, researchers search through archives of conversation recordings from public radio and TV to find instances of potential ambiguity, which is then used to create an Ambiguity Corpus, preserving each case with its original context and the audio recording that contains the prosody. For each case, human annotators judge what they thought the speaker meant. Judgments are provided for just the transcript, just the recording, the transcript in its context, and the recording in its context. By comparing people's interpretations, the researchers compare the roles of context and prosody on these interpretations. To further investigate hypotheses about how context and prosody work together to resolve ambiguity in everyday conversations, the research team builds a computational cognitive model that simulates how someone interprets ambiguous utterances like the ones identified in the Ambiguity Corpus, given these information sources. To evaluate the hypotheses about context and prosody that this model encodes, follow-up experiments are conducted that test specific model predictions about how context, prosody, and their interaction matter for interpretations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.