Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements

Canestrelli, Anneloes R.; Mak, Willem M.; Sanders, Ted

doi:10.1080/01690965.2012.685885

Cited by 85 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Previous studies have shown that connectives signal how two clauses have to be integrated, leading us to expect that the presence of connectives will result in faster processing of the subsequent segment (cf. Canestrelli et al, 2013;Cozijn et al, 2011;Haberlandt, 1982;Millis & Just, 1994;Sanders & Noordman, 2000). We also expect that the presence of connectives affects students' rereading patterns.…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In our study we focus on students' text comprehension as well as on the cognitive processes that underlie their text comprehension. Earlier studies focused on either of the two, and if online processing was measured, the "texts" consisted of sentence pairs containing one or two clauses before and one clause after the coherence marker (Cain & Nash, 2011;Canestrelli, Mak, & Sanders, 2013;Haberlandt, 1982;Millis & Just, 1994). There are only two studies in which more experienced adult readers read short narratives varying from 7 to 15 sentences STUDENTS' PROCESSING OF CONNECTIVES (Cozijn, Noordman, & Vonk, 2011;Sanders & Noordman, 2000).…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, connectives act as a guide by signaling how two clauses should be integrated at positions at which students do not have enough information to establish the coherence relation (cf. Canestrelli et al, 2013;Sanders & Noordman, 2000). Notably, this implies that it makes sense to distinguish between the number of regressions and the rereading duration.…”

Section: Processing Of Coherence Markersmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts

Silfhout

Evers-Vermeul

Sanders

2014

Discourse Processes

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Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Eye-tracking results show that connectives lead to faster processing of subsequent information as well as shorter rereading times of previous text information. Connectives also trigger readers to make regressions to preceding information. These findings indicate that connectives function as immediate "processing instructions." Furthermore, all students performed better on local comprehension tasks (i.e., bridging inference questions) after reading texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. These findings apply to both text types and to all students, regardless of reading proficiency. This study highlights the importance of comprehensible texts in which implicit coherence relations are avoided.

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Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Processing Of Coherence Markersmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts

Silfhout

Evers-Vermeul

Sanders

2014

Discourse Processes

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“…A series of studies adopting a linguistic or a pragmatic perspective define subjectivity as the expression of the speaker's or of a third party's perspective (Benveniste 1966;Lyons 1982Lyons , 1995Traugott 1989Traugott , 1995Traugott , 1999Sthioul 2000;Tahara 2000;Saussure 2013). Finally, subjectivity defined as the speaker's evidence for her claims was identified as an important factor for discourse processing both for machines (Wiebe 1994, Wiebe et al 1999Chen 2008) and for humans (Sanders 2005;Canestrelli et al 2013;Zufferey and Gygax 2016). Benveniste (1966Benveniste ( /1971 and Lyons (1982) pointed out that languages provide the speaker with the linguistic means to express her attitudes and beliefs.…”

Section: Defining Subjectivity Different Approaches To Subjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An Experimental Study Using Inter-Annotator Agreement Rates and Corpus-Based Data

Grisot

2017

Corpus Pragmatics

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In this paper, I investigate experimentally the question of subjectivity and its supposed triggering by the categories of tense and grammatical aspect. The study is carried out in the relevance theoretic pragmatic framework, which assumes that certain linguistic expressions encode procedural information constraining the determination of the explicit content of an utterance (that is, the explicature), and of the implicatures (that is, implicit premises and implicit conclusions). In the current state of the art, the notion of subjectivity, which roughly means the expression of a point of view or perspective, has been correlated to a series of linguistic expressions, such as deictic elements (personal, spatial, temporal), grammatical aspect and connectives. Here, I examine the relation between subjectivity and two parameters of temporal reference: verbal tenses and grammatical aspect. Annotation experiments were carried out on corpus data in English, French and Serbian in order to test whether native speakers are able to consciously identify and evaluate information about subjectivity in corpus data. Based on the results of these experiments and using the notion of (specific) procedural versus general (pragmatic) inference, I discuss the status of subjectivity as semantic (encoded procedural information) or pragmatic (general inferential) information, and give evidence in favour of the latter.

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“…Intuitively, retrieving unreliable and subjective information seems undesirable, as it can impact negatively decision making [17] and may require time-consuming fact crossvalidation from other sources [56]. However, whereas assessing factuality & objectivity seems a standard cognitive task for humans [8], search engine users often mistake the output of web search engines as a confirmation of factuality or objectivity. For instance, many interpret the ranking of search results as a key indicator of credibility [20], whereas social network users often determine the truthfulness of content based on misleading heuristics, such as if an item is retweeted [48].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of factuality, objectivity and relevance

Lioma

Larsen

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies

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Much of the information processed by Information Retrieval (IR) systems is unreliable, biased, and generally untrustworthy [15,45,48]. Yet, factuality & objectivity detection is not a standard component of IR systems, even though it has been possible in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last decade. Motivated by this, we ask if and how factuality & objectivity detection may benefit IR. We answer this in two parts. First, we use state-of-the-art NLP to compute the probability of document factuality & objectivity in two TREC collections, and analyse its relation to document relevance. We find that factuality is strongly and positively correlated to document relevance, but objectivity is not. Second, we study the impact of factuality & objectivity to retrieval effectiveness by treating them as query independent features that we combine with a competitive language modelling baseline. Experiments with 450 TREC queries show that factuality improves precision by more than 10% over strong baselines, especially for the type of uncurated data typically used in web search; objectivity gives mixed results. An overall clear trend is that document factuality & objectivity is much more beneficial to IR when searching uncurated (e.g. web) documents vs. curated (e.g. state documentation and newswire articles).To our knowledge, this is the first study of factuality & objectivity for back-end IR, contributing novel findings about the relation between relevance and factuality/objectivity, and statistically significant gains to retrieval effectiveness in the competitive web search task.

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Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements

Cited by 85 publications

References 42 publications

Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts

Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts

Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An Experimental Study Using Inter-Annotator Agreement Rates and Corpus-Based Data

A study of factuality, objectivity and relevance

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