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，当多种潜在意义可能存在时，人类往往需要处理歧义。听众如何成功地理解说话者的意思？一种直觉是，听者使用上下文(前面的对话)和韵律(讲话的旋律和节奏元素)的线索来破译原意。本研究探讨了这两个信息源之间的关系，即(I)语境和韵律是否提供了两种不同的信息流，或者(Ii)语境是信息的主要来源，而韵律反映了语境。为了更好地理解语境和韵律如何帮助说话人解决歧义，这项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。具体地说，这个项目建立了一个独特的自然主义歧义语料库，捕捉到了人们真正说的经过证明的不同句子。首先，研究人员从公共广播和电视的对话录音档案中搜索潜在的歧义实例，然后用它来创建歧义语料库，保存每个案例的原始上下文和包含韵律的音频记录。对于每一种情况，人类注释员都会判断他们认为说话者的意思。判决只针对抄本、录音、其背景下的抄本和其语境中的记录。通过比较人们的解释，研究人员比较了语境和韵律在这些解释中的作用。为了进一步研究语境和韵律如何共同作用来解决日常对话中的歧义的假设，研究团队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，给定这些信息来源。为了评估这个模型编码的关于语境和韵律的假设，进行了后续实验，测试关于语境、韵律及其交互作用对解释的影响的特定模型预测。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.