Exploring memory and processing through a gold standard annotation of Dundee

Cory Shain1, Marten van Schijndel1, Edward Gibson2 and William Schuler1 1Ohio State U. 2MIT [email protected] Theories of sentence processing such as Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [2] predict memoryrelated processing difficulty proportionate to the number of discourse referents intervening between a noun or finite verb and its backward-looking dependency. This prediction has held in experiments using constructed stimuli [6]. However, naturalistic studies of memory effects [1] using the Dundee eye-tracking corpus [3] have shown negative effects for integration of automatically estimated dependencies when applied broadly, and only weak positive effects (when corrected for multiple trials) when applied more narrowly. One possible explanation for this is that automaticallyparsed dependencies might introduce bias due to the difficulty of parsing longer sentences, which disproportionately contain long dependencies.