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，当可能有多种潜在含义时，人类往往需要驾驭歧义。听众如何成功地理解演讲者的意思？一种直觉是，听者利用上下文（前面的对话）和韵律（语音的旋律和节奏元素）的线索来解读意图。本研究探讨这两个信息源之间的关系，问是否（i）上下文和韵律提供两个不同的信息流，或如果（ii）上下文是主要的信息来源，而韵律反映了上下文。为了更好地理解语境和韵律如何帮助说话者解决歧义，这篇博士论文研究利用了最近才出现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主义歧义语料库，捕捉人们真正说的经过证明的和不同的句子。首先，研究人员从公共广播和电视的谈话录音档案中寻找潜在的歧义实例，然后用于创建歧义语料库，保留每个案例及其原始上下文和包含韵律的录音。对于每一种情况，人类注释者都会判断他们认为说话者的意思。判决书只提供了文字记录，只提供了录音，文字记录在其上下文中，录音在其上下文中。通过对比人们的理解，研究者比较了语境和韵律在这些理解中的作用。为了进一步研究关于语境和韵律如何共同解决日常对话中的歧义的假设，研究小组建立了一个计算认知模型，该模型模拟了在给定这些信息源的情况下，人们如何解释歧义语料库中识别的歧义话语。为了评估该模型编码的上下文和韵律的假设，进行了后续实验，测试特定的模型预测上下文，韵律，以及它们的相互作用对口译的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.