Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue
This addresses the problem of understanding cost-effective communication strategies in dialogue for linguists and AI researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on known information-theoretic properties.
The study tackled the problem of how construction repetition affects information rate in dialogue, finding that repetition of multi-word units reduces utterance information content, with effects increasing throughout dialogues and being stronger for referential constructions.
Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of lexicalised constructions -- i.e., recurring multi-word units -- in English open-domain spoken dialogues. We hypothesise that speakers use construction repetition to mitigate information rate, leading to an overall decrease in utterance information content over the course of a dialogue. We conduct a quantitative analysis, measuring the information content of constructions and that of their containing utterances, estimating information content with an adaptive neural language model. We observe that construction usage lowers the information content of utterances. This facilitating effect (i) increases throughout dialogues, (ii) is boosted by repetition, (iii) grows as a function of repetition frequency and density, and (iv) is stronger for repetitions of referential constructions.