An eye-tracking evaluation of some parser complexity metrics

摘要

Information theoretic measures of incremental parser load were generated from a phrase structure parser and a dependency parser and then compared with incremental eye movement metrics collected for the same temporarily syntactically ambiguous sentences, focussing on the disambiguat-ing word. The findings show that the surprisal and entropy reduction metrics computed over a phrase structure grammar make good candidates for predictors of text readability for human comprehen-ders. This leads to a suggestion for the use of such metrics in Natural Language Generation (NLG).