What cognitive mechanisms support the emergence of linguistic conventions from repeated interaction? We present results from a large-scale, multi-player replication of the classic tangrams task, focusing on three foundational properties of conventions: arbitrariness, stability, and reduction of utterance length over time. These results motivate a theory of convention-formation where agents, tho...

This paper reports on the results of the adjunct test performed by GE for the MUC-4 evaluation of text processing systems . In this test, we evaluated the effect of an object-oriented templat e design and associated matching conditions on the scores . The results indicate that the curren t MUC.{ "flat" templade design with cross-references closely approximates a true object-oriente d design . H...

China has seen the most rapid growth in the development of mobile communications in the world. Many existing mobile users have an established comfort level with mobile device functionality. This may alleviate their reluctance to conduct mobile commerce (m-commerce) activities. Thus, m-commerce has a potentially exceptional future in China. However, technology development is seriously challenged...

Does knowledge of sociolinguistic variation influence how we perceive and understand speech coming from different kinds of people? A series of experiments investigated whether listeners have knowledge about t/d deletion, a sociolinguistic variable, and, if so, whether this knowledge influences their language comprehension. Experiment 1 investigated listeners’ knowledge of the social correlates ...

This paper describes a methodology for testing and evaluating the performance of Machine Reading systems through Question Answering and Reading Comprehension Tests. The methodology is being used in QA4MRE (QA for Machine Reading Evaluation), one of the labs of CLEF. We report here the conclusions and lessons learned after the first campaign in 2011.

As speech interfaces become more prevalent, it i s becoming more crucial that they be developed in a way that minimizes cognitive load for users. One major barrier to creating systems that are more human-centered has been the lack of an accepted online methodology for directly evaluating the cognitive resource demands of different systems. The present study extends a classic tool from cognitive...

Determining reference and referential links in discourse is one of the biggest and most important challenges in natural language understanding. In particular, computing coreference classes over the set of referring expressions in text is crucial for its further syntactic and semantic processing. We present a system for automatic anaphora resolution that can be used on arbitrary texts in Czech. ...

This paper describes a model of cooperative behavior and describes how such a model can be applied in a natural language understanding system. We assume that agents attempt to recognize the plans of other agents and, then, use this plan when deciding what response to make. In particular, we show that, given a setting in which purposeful dialogues occur, this model can account for responses that...

In this paper, we propose a new generative approach for semantic slot filling task in spoken language understanding using a nonparametric Bayesian formalism. Slot filling is typically formulated as a sequential labeling problem, which does not directly deal with the posterior distribution of possible slot values. We present a nonparametric Bayesian model involving the generation of arbitrary na...

Among the components included in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems is a grammar which spec i f i es much o f the l i n g u i s t i c s t ruc tu re o f the ut terances tha t can be expected. However, i t is ce r ta in tha t inputs that are ill-formed with respect to the grammar will be received, both because people regularly form ungra=cmatical utterances and because there are a varie...