Close = Relevant? The Role of Context in Efficient Language Production

We formally derive a mathematical model for evaluating the effect of context relevance in language production. The model is based on the principle that distant contextual cues tend to gradually lose their relevance for predicting upcoming linguistic signals. We evaluate our model against a hypothesis of efficient communication (Genzel and Charniak’s Constant Entropy Rate hypothesis). We show that the development of entropy throughout discourses is described significantly better by a model with cue relevance decay than by previous models that do not consider context effects.