Title: Modeling Semantic Expectation: Using Script Knowledge for Referent Prediction,
Abstract: Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that
humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might
be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we
investigate the factors that affect human prediction by building a
computational model that can predict upcoming discourse referents based on
linguistic knowledge alone vs. linguistic knowledge jointly with common-sense
knowledge in the form of scripts. We find that script knowledge significantly
improves model estimates of human predictions. In a second study, we test the
highly controversial hypothesis that predictability influences referring
expression type but do not find evidence for such an effect.