Brian Dillon's lecture - 2017-04-04
UMass CS 690N http://people.cs.umass.edu/~brenocon/anlp2017/
Partial notes by Brendan O'Connor

Garden path sentence

the horse raced past the [barn fell]
the horse [that was raced past the barn] fell

two theories to explain (empirical facts are agreed upon)

(1) Garden path theory (Frazier)
Heuristics (innate??)
 - Minimal attachment: construct parse with as few nodes as possible
 - Late closure: analyze incoming constits as daughters of smaller minimal phrase: i.e. prefer shift over reduce (?)

(2) Constraint satisfaction theory.  Lots of possible constraints: discourse, syntax, etc.
(variant) Levy 2008 surprisal theory. Analysis based on your experience of words/syntax and logprob of next word conditioned on left context.

John Hale. "Automaton theories of human sentence comprehension."  Has nice overview. Theoretical bridging perspective: experience weighting that backs incremental parsing automata.

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There's the lamp near the painting of the house that was damaged in the flood.
What was damaged?

(NP1 lamp)? (NP2 painting)? (NP3 house)?

some human experiments find preference ordering:
NP3 > NP1 > NP2

some corpus studies find:
NP3 > NP1 = NP2

based on WSJ PTB, boo

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filled gap effect

I wonder who Ruth brought us home to _ at Christmas

partial analysis: you see gap earlier
I wonder who Ruth brought _

but that's wrong at next word
I wonder who Ruth brought ??us

filled gap effect is strong and common

another example
that's the car the dog worried
that's the car the dog worried compulsively about

some evidence that at "worried" people think "the car" is supposed to be the object and don't like it.

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Q: lookahead?
A: seems to be very little in human processing, though perhaps prediction and its violations inform processing (Levy's theory).