Lexical accommodation in human- and machine-interpreted dialogues

摘要

We report results of lexical accommodation studies involving three different interpretation settings: human-human monolingual; human-interpreted bilingual; and machine-interpreted bilingual. We found significant accommodation across all types of lexical items in all three conversational settings, with the highest rate in the human-interpreted setting. We also examine this phenomenon with respect to open-class part-of-speech categories. Motivations for accommodation, including speakers' concerns for social standing and communicational efficiency, are examined in the light of the results obtained for English, and briefly compared with quite different results obtained for Japanese. Finally, we draw implications for the design and implementation of multimedia human-computer interfaces. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited. [References: 29]