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The Effect of Scene Variation on the Redundant Use of Color in Definite Reference
Author(s) -
Koolen Ruud,
Goudbeek Martijn,
Krahmer Emiel
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12019
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , computer science , artificial intelligence , preference , domain (mathematical analysis) , identification (biology) , scene statistics , pattern recognition (psychology) , computer vision , mathematics , statistics , psychology , perception , mathematical analysis , physics , botany , neuroscience , astrophysics , biology
Abstract This study investigates to what extent the amount of variation in a visual scene causes speakers to mention the attribute color in their definite target descriptions, focusing on scenes in which this attribute is not needed for identification of the target. The results of our three experiments show that speakers are more likely to redundantly include a color attribute when the scene variation is high as compared with when this variation is low (even if this leads to overspecified descriptions). We argue that these findings are problematic for existing algorithms that aim to automatically generate psychologically realistic target descriptions, such as the I ncremental A lgorithm, as these algorithms make use of a fixed preference order per domain and do not take visual scene variation into account.