Franzluebbers, Berta and Dunagan, Donald and Stanojevic, Milos and Buys, Jan and Hale, John (2024) Multipath parsing in the brain, Proceedings of 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), Bangkok, Thailand, 12215-12229, Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Abstract
Humans understand sentences word-by-word, in the order that they hear them. This incrementality entails resolving temporary ambiguities about syntactic relationships. We investigate how humans process these syntactic ambiguities by correlating predictions from incremental generative dependency parsers with timecourse data from people undergoing functional neuroimaging while listening to an audiobook. In particular, we compare competing hypotheses regarding the number of developing syntactic analyses in play during word-by-word comprehension: one vs more than one. This comparison involves evaluating syntactic surprisal from a state-of-the-art dependency parser with LLM-adapted encodings against an existing fMRI dataset. In both English and Chinese data, we find evidence for multipath parsing. Brain regions associated with this multipath effect include bilateral superior temporal gyrus.
| Item Type: | Conference paper |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence > Natural language processing Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence > Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence > Cognitive science |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Aug 2024 06:28 |
| Last Modified: | 26 Aug 2024 06:28 |
| URI: | https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1702 |
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