Why Are Parsing Actions for Understanding Message Hierarchies Not Random?
This addresses a theoretical issue in understanding human language comprehension for linguistics and AI, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work with simple modifications.
The study tackled the problem of why human parsing strategies are not random by testing if agents with random parsing can maintain high communication accuracy under more complex hierarchical inputs and a surprisal-based objective, finding that they do not achieve high accuracy under these conditions.
If humans understood language by randomly selecting parsing actions, it might have been necessary to construct a robust symbolic system capable of being interpreted under any hierarchical structure. However, human parsing strategies do not seem to follow such a random pattern. Why is that the case? In fact, a previous study on emergent communication using models with hierarchical biases have reported that agents adopting random parsing strategies$\unicode{x2013}$ones that deviate significantly from human language comprehension$\unicode{x2013}$can achieve high communication accuracy. In this study, we investigate this issue by making two simple and natural modifications to the experimental setup: (I) we use more complex inputs that have hierarchical structures, such that random parsing makes semantic interpretation more difficult, and (II) we incorporate a surprisal-related term, which is known to influence the order of words and characters in natural language, into the objective function. With these changes, we evaluate whether agents employing random parsing strategies still maintain high communication accuracy.