EMNLP 2021main20 citations
Is Information Density Uniform in Task-Oriented Dialogues?
Mario Giulianelli, Arabella Sinclair, Raquel Fernández
Abstract
The Uniform Information Density principle states that speakers plan their utterances to reduce fluctuations in the density of the information transmitted. In this paper, we test whether, and within which contextual units this principle holds in task-oriented dialogues. We show that there is evidence supporting the principle in written dialogues where participants play a cooperative reference game as well as in spoken dialogues involving instruction giving and following. Our study underlines the importance of identifying the relevant contextual components, showing that information content increases particularly within topically and referentially related contextual units.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{giulianelli-etal-2021-information,
title = "Is Information Density Uniform in Task-Oriented Dialogues?",
author = "Giulianelli, Mario and
Sinclair, Arabella and
Fern{\'a}ndez, Raquel",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.652/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.652",
pages = "8271--8283"
}