Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

One of the challenges in cognitive research on language is to find meaning representations that go beyond simple (lexical, non-compositional) representations and can capture the incremental interpretation of discourse. At the same time, the representations should be practical enough to be applicable to data that are of interests to psycholinguists and cognitive scientists.

In this presentation, I demonstrate how meaning representations from formal discourse semantics, Discourse Representation Structures (DRS), can be utilized for analyzing psycholinguistic corpora (corpora which also carry information about readers' neural and/or behavioral measures, like EEG brain activity or eye tracking measures). I briefly discuss psycholinguistic corpus research and present a so-called UCL corpus (Frank et al., 2013), which we annotated with DRS representations using Parallel Meaning Bank annotation tools (Abzianidze et al., 2017). The annotated corpus makes it possible to build a link between behavioral measures (e.g., eye fixations and saccades, reaction times) and discourse interpretation. More concretely, I show how the psycholinguistic corpus research can be used to test claims regarding meaning and cognition present in theories of sentence processing, for instance, the claim that cognitive and reading difficulties are linked to the introduction of discourse referents (Dependency locality theory, Gibson, 2000, among others).

References:
Abzianidze, L. et al. (2017). The parallel meaning bank: Towards a multilingual corpus of translations annotated with compositional meaning representations. EACL.
Frank, S. L. et al. (2013). Reading time data for evaluating broad-coverage models of English sentence processing. Behavior research methods, 45, 1182-1190.
Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. Image, language, brain, 2000, 95-126.

*** The talk will be delivered in person (MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1) and will be streamed via Zoom. For details how to join the Zoom meeting, please write to sevcikova et ufal.mff.cuni.cz ***