🚀 go-pugleaf

that's great, Michelle!  Lise

On Wed, 19 May 1999, Dan Jurafsky wrote:

> hi ling and ics folks,
> 
> i'm very excited to send out a note of congratulations for 
> Michelle Gregory, who just won an Outstanding Student Paper Award 
> for her paper (abstract below) at the upcoming Ninth Annual 
> Conference of the Society for Text and Discourse!  
> -dan
> 
> 
> Effects of informativeness on durational shortening in conversation
> 
> Michelle L. Gregory, William D. Raymond, Alan Bell, and Daniel Jurafsky
> 
>     Researchers have long noted a relationship between informativeness and
> the pronunciation of words (Jespersen 1923): Less informative words are
> more likely to be reduced than more informative words (Jurafsky et al.
> 1998, Fowler et al. 1987, Resnik 1993). In this study, we investigate the
> effects on durational shortening of three possible sources of
> informativeness; the probability of a word given the two previous words,
> the number of times a word is used in the prior context, and the semantic
> word association between the word and the discourse context (as measured
> by LSA). From 789 examples from the transcribed Switchboard corpus of
> telephone conversations (Greenberg et al. 1996), we conclude that all
> three of these factors independently affect a word's informativeness in
> conversation, and hence its degree of durational shortening. Thus, we
> provide a model of the knowledge that speakers exploit during
> conversation.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Dan Jurafsky  (jurafsky@colorado.edu   http://www.colorado.edu/ling/jurafsky)
>  Dept of Linguistics, Dept of Computer Science, Institute of Cognitive Science
>  University of Colorado at Boulder           PHONE: (303)492-1300
>  Boulder, CO 80309-0295                      FAX: (303)492-4416
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>