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Spontaneous, controlled acts of reference between friends and strangers
Sean Trott1, Benjamin Bergen1, Eva Wittenberg2
1Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego, San Diego, United States.
Language Resources and Evaluation
|December 5, 2022
Summary
Researchers created the SCARFS database, a corpus of referring expressions, to study how speakers choose words and how listeners understand them. This resource aids research into language, communication, and speaker-listener interactions.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Speakers have many ways to refer to entities, varying in form and length.
- Understanding factors influencing these choices and their impact on comprehension is challenging.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce the SCARFS (Spontaneous, Controlled Acts of Reference between Friends and Strangers) Database.
- Provide a resource for studying how speakers refer and how comprehenders resolve referents.
Main Methods:
- Collected a corpus of ~20,000 English nominal referring expressions (NREs) from a communication game.
- Annotated each NRE with target concept, formal properties, interlocutor relationship (friend/stranger), and communicative outcome.
Main Results:
- The SCARFS database offers a rich resource for analyzing spontaneous language use.
- Enables investigation into referential strategies and comprehension.
Conclusions:
- The SCARFS database supports diverse research on dialogic speech, speaker adaptation, and communicative success.
- Facilitates deeper understanding of the dynamics between language production and comprehension.
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