Accenting and Given/New Status
Julia Hirschberg
CS 4706
7/15/2016
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Issues
• What discourse structures are important in
processing?
• What are the intonational cues to these
structures?
• Can listeners readily attend to these cues? Online?
• How do they incorporate intonational information
in their interpretations? What other information
do they use?
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Defining Given/New
• Halliday ‘67:
– Given: Recoverable from some form of context
– New: Not recoverable
• Chafe ’74 ’76:
– Given: what S believes is in H’s consciousness
– New: what S believes is not…
– “Chafe-givenness”
Yesterday I had my class disrupted by a bulldog/dog.
I’m beginning to dislike dogs/bulldogs.
• But not vice versa….
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Why do we care about the given/new
distinction?
• Building a model of the discourse
– What do S and H believe to be true?
– What is in their consciousness now?
– What is ‘grounded’?
• Speech technologies
– TTS: Given information is often deaccented
while new information is usually accented …
but
– ASR...
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Prince ’81: A Given/New Taxonomy
• Text as set of instructions from S to H on how to
construct a discourse model
– Model includes discourse entities, attributes,
and links between entities
– Discourse entities: individuals, classes,
exemplars, substances, concepts (NPs)
– Entities as ‘hooks’ on which to hang attributes
(Webber ’78)
• Entities when first introduced are new
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– Brand-new (H must create a new entity)
I saw a unicorn today.
– Unused (H already knows of this entity)
I saw your roommate today.
• Evoked entities are old -- already in the
discourse
– Textually evoked
The unicorn was eating a muffin.
– Situationally evoked
That bus was going too fast!
• Inferables
– Containing
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I bought a pair of socks. One of them had a hole
in it.
– Non-containing
I bought a new car. One of the tires is already
flat.
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Prince ‘92
– Definiteness: subject NPs tend to be
syntactically definite and old
– Indefiniteness: object NPs tend to be
indefinite and new
I saw a black cat yesterday. The cat looked hungry.
• Definite articles, demonstratives, possessives,
personal pronouns, proper nouns, quantifiers like
all, every signal definiteness
• Indefinite articles, quantifiers like some, any, one
signal indefiniteness
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• But….
This guy came into the room.
There were the usual subjects at the bar.
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What’s wrong with a Hearer-centric model of
given/new?
• Hearer-centric information status:
– Given: what S believes H has in his/her
consciousness
– New: what S believes H does not have in
his/her consciousness
• But discourse entities may also be given and
new wrt the current discourse
– Discourse-old: already evoked in the
discourse
– Discourse-new: not evoked
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•
•
•
•
•
Hearer-new --> Discourse-new (unless…?)
Discourse-new --> ?
Hearer-old --> ?
Discourse-old --> Hearer-old (unless….?)
What does this new distinction buy us?
– A way to explain
definiteness/indefiniteness in terms of
Hearer status only
– More fine-grained distinctions to explain
why items are accented or deaccented
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Inferrables: H-old, H-new, D-old,D-new
• Entities S may believe H can infer based
upon a previously evoked discourse entity
A bus plowed into a store on Broadway.
The driver emerged without a scratch.
?The bumper sticker read “How’s my
driving?”.
*The coins spilled everywhere.
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Containing Inferrables
• The entity that evokes the inferable is mentioned
at the same time as the inferable
The tires of my car were all flat.
The fingers on her right hand turned blue.
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Empirical Analysis (Prince ‘92)
• What regularities can be observed for subjects?
– Definite/indefinite
– Hearer-old? Discourse-old?
• Results:
– D-old NPs tend to be subjects
– D-old pronouns more likely to be subjects
than other D-old NPs
– D-old non-pronouns+Inferrables seem to
pattern together
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• Discourse-old predicts subjecthood better than
Hearer-old status or definiteness
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How does this help us in
analyzing/generating a discourse?
• Analysis:
– How can we identify sentence topics?
– How can we decide what is in S and H’s
discourse models? What would this tell us
about what they know? Believe?
• Generation:
– How do we produce natural-sounding
sentences?
• How easy is this to do? For humans?
Machines?
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Karl Rove has called the state Ground Zero in the presidential race, and
as soon as the general election contest began, Challenging President
Bush and Democrat Democrat John Kerry took their campaigns to the
Sunshine State. Asked whether economic conditions or terrorism would
be more important to their vote this fall, 65% in the survey said
economic conditions, and only 26% said terrorism. Fifty-seven percent
of Americans say it's time for a "new direction" in the nation's
leadership, fewer than at this point in his father's presidency but a
majority nonetheless. Arguing that he is happy to make Sept. 11 an
election issue, Kerry said Sunday that the Bush administration is
"stonewalling" a commission investigation into security failures before
the terrorist attacks. Kerry on Friday said job losses "rip the heart out of
our economy" and criticized Bush's ability to make up for the millions of
jobs that have disappeared during his administration. Kerry, giving the
Democrats' weekly radio address, said Bush had misplaced priorities in
Iraq, spending billions of dollars on contracts to Halliburton Co. but not
providing troops enough body armor and other protective equipment.
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Intonational marking of
given/new
• Pitch accents can cue given/new: Halliday
(1967), Brown (1983), Terken (1984)
• Hirschberg & Pierrehumbert (1986) relate
given/new and accentuation to G&S’s model of
global salience, accounting for ‘exceptions’:
 deacc of entities in non-immed global focus
 deacc of entities in sister DS, see Davis &
Hirschberg (1988), Nakatani (1997)
 accentuation of re-introduced given entities
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Brown ‘83: How does accent related to
given/new?
• Speech elicitation in lab
– Scottish English
– Prince ‘81 derived categories
• Results:
– Brand-new information accented
• Note: new entity/old expression
– Inferable information accented
– Evoked information deaccented
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Bard’99: Givenness, deaccenting and
intelligibility
• Speech elicited in lab
– Glasgow English Map Task
– Given: repeated mention (within dialogue vs.
across dialogue)
– Does structural similarity --> deaccenting -->
less intelligibility (Terken & Hirschberg ‘94)
• Weird definition of deaccenting (includes difference
in boundary tone)
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So, do lab experiments generalize?
• Results:
– Deaccenting rare in repeated mentions
(within and across dialogues)
– Second mentions less intelligible whether
deaccented or not (tho more change when
deaccented)
– Structural difference doesn’t account for
deaccenting
• But same structure repetitions rare
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Intonation in processing
information status
• Are listeners sensitive to intonational correlates
of information status?
• Evidence that ‘appropriate’ accentuation
facilitates comprehension:
– Birch & Clifton (1995): appropriateness speeds
makes-sense judgments in Q&A pairs
– Bock & Mazzella (1983): comprehension time of
denial-counterassertion pairs
– Davidson (2001): phoneme-monitoring in denialcounterassertion pairs
– Terken & Nooteboom (1987), Nooteboom & Kruyt
7/15/2016 (1987): verification latencies of target words
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Intonational cues in
on-line processing
• Dahan et al. (2002): accentuation effects
referential interpretation even at very early
stages of processing
• Used eye-tracking to monitor listeners’ fixations
on pictured entities as they heard instructions to
manipulate these entities on computer screen
• Examined moment-by-moment recognition of
accented vs. unaccented words which share a
primary-stressed initial syllable (e.g.
candy/candle).
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Dahan et al. (2002)
• Example discourse:
“Put the candy below the triangle.
Now put the CANDLE above the square.”
utt 1
<candle>
<candle>
<candy>
<candy>
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utt 2
Now put the [kæn] ...
Now put the [kæn] ...
Now put the [kæn] ...
Now put the [kæn] ...
pred. fixation
= candle
= candy
= candy
= candle
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candle-CANDLE
condition
candle
candy
[From Dahan et al. (2002)]
 Competition from “candy” upon hearing accented [kæn].
 Accentuation is used by listeners to process discourse
representations on-line, as a word is unfolding.
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Accent, Given/New, and Grammatical
Function
• Given/new interacts with property-sharing
constraints to determine the distribution of
accents in discourse.
• Terken & Hirschberg (1994): prior mention and
grammatical function --> deaccenting
• Dahan et al ‘02 also examine conditions in
which the antecedent and target did not share
grammatical role:
“Put the necklace below the candle.
Now put the CANDLE above the square.”
– NO competitor effects (i.e. looks to “candy” upon
hearing accented [kæn])
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• “Put the necklace below the candle.
Now put the CANDLE above the square.”
• Prediction: “candle” is given  competition
from “candy” upon hearing accented [kæn].
[From Dahan et al. (2002)]
No competitor effects
in this condition!
Here, accent serves to
cue shift in “focus”.
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[See also Terken & Hirschberg (1994)]
Grammatical Role or Syntactic parallelism?
• Dahan et al.’s and Terken & Hirschberg’s data
confound grammatical role with syntactic
parallelism
• Venditti et al ‘02,’03: syntactic parallelism
(NOT just persistence of grammatical role)
affects interpretation of nuclear-accented
pronouns
John hit Bill and then HE ... hit George. (N2 pref)
... ran away.
7/15/2016
(less N2 pref)
• N2 pref when syntatically parallel clauses
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Future directions
• Processing in dynamic models of attention and
discourse salience
• Property-sharing, parallelism, and other
interacting constraints on accentuation
• Time course of integration of intonational
information
• Cross-linguistic perspectives on intonation and
discourse processing
• Role of ambiguity ‘awareness’ in experimental
designs
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Next Week
• Read ASR overview
• Go to Sameer’s lab on March 24 to get help
building a TTS system or using a speech
recognizer
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