Integrating Syntactic Priming into an Incremental Probabilistic Parser, with an Application to Psycholinguistic Modeling

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 417–424, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Integrating Syntactic Priming into an Incremental Probabilistic Parser, with an Application to Psycholinguistic Modeling Amit Dubey and Frank Keller and Patrick Sturt Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK {amit.dubey,patrick.sturt,frank.keller}@ed.ac.uk Abstract The psycholinguistic literature provides evidence for syntactic priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat structures. This pa- per describes a method for incorporating priming into an incremental probabilis- tic parser. Three models are compared, which involve priming of rules between sentences, within sentences, and within coordinate structures. These models sim- ulate the reading time advantage for par- allel structures found in human data, and also yield a small increase in overall pars- ing accuracy. 1 Introduction Over the last two decades, the psycholinguistic literature has provided a wealth of experimental evidence for syntactic priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat syntactic structures (e.g., Bock, 1986). Most work on syntactic priming has been con- cerned with sentence production; however, recent studies also demonstrate a preference for struc- tural repetition in human parsing. This includes the so-called parallelism effect demonstrated by Frazier et al. (2000): speakers processes coordi- nated structures more quickly when the second conjunct repeats the syntactic structure of the first conjunct. Two alternative accounts of the parallelism ef- fect have been proposed. Dubey et al. (2005) ar- gue that the effect is simply an instance of a perva- sive syntactic priming mechanism in human pars- ing. They provide evidence from a series of cor- pus studies which show that parallelism is not lim- ited to co-ordination, but occurs in a wide range of syntactic structures, both within and between sentences, as predicted if a general priming mech- anism is assumed. (They also show this effect is stronger in coordinate structures, which could ex- plain Frazier et al.’s (2000) results.) Frazier and Clifton (2001) propose an alterna- tive account of the parallelism effect in terms of a copying mechanism. Unlike priming, this mecha- nism is highly specialized and only applies to co- ordinate structures: if the second conjunct is en- countered, then instead of building new structure, the language processor simply copies the structure of the first conjunct; this explains why a speed- up is observed if the two conjuncts are parallel. If the copying account is correct, then we would ex- pect parallelism effects to be restricted to coordi- nate structures and not to apply in other contexts. This paper presents a parsing model which im- plements both the priming mechanism and the copying mechanism, making it possible to com- pare their predictions on human reading time data. Our model also simulates other important aspects of human parsing: (i) it is broad-coverage, i.e., it yields accurate parses for unrestricted input, and (ii) it processes sentences incrementally, i.e., on a word-by-word basis. This general modeling framework builds on probabilistic accounts of hu- man parsing as proposed by Jurafsky …

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