The integration of syntax and semantic plausibility in a wide-coverage model of human sentence processing [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Ulrike Padó

TheIntegrationofSyntaxandSemanticPlausibilityinaWide CoverageModelofHumanSentenceProcessingDissertationzurErlangungdesakademischenGradeseinesDoktorsderPhilosophiederPhilosophischenFakultätenderUniversitätdesSaarlandesvorgelegtvonUlrikePadóausDetmoldSaarbrücken,2007Dekan: Prof. Dr. UlrikeDemskeBerichterstatter: Prof. Dr. MatthewW.CrockerDr. FrankKellerTagderletztenPrüfungsleistung: 21.5.2007AbstractModels of human sentence processing have paid much attention to three key char-acteristics of the sentence processor: Its robust and accurate processing of unseeninput(widecoverage),itsimmediate,incrementalinterpretationofpartialinputanditssensitivitytostructuralfrequenciesinpreviouslanguageexperience. Inthisthesis,weproposeamodelofhumansentenceprocessingthataccountsforthesethreecharac teristicsandalsomodelsafourthkeycharacteristic,namelytheinfluenceofsemanticplausibilityonsentenceprocessing.Thepreconditionforsuchasentenceprocessingmodelisageneralmodelofhumanplausibility intuitions. We therefore begin by presenting a probabilistic model ofthe plausibility of verb argument relations, which we estimate as the probability ofencountering a verb argument pair in the relation specified by a thematic role in arole annotated training corpus. This model faces a significant sparse data problem,whichwealleviatebycombiningtwoorthogonalsmoothingmethods. Weshowthatthesmoothedmodel’spredictionsaresignificantlycorrelatedtohumanplausibilityjudgementsforarangeoftestsets.