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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Towards a Systematic Analysis of Linguistic and Visual Complexity in Disambiguation and Structural Prediction</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>O¨zge Alac¸am</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Tobias Staron</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Wolfgang Menzel</string-name>
          <email>menzel@informatik.uni-hamburg.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Department of Informatics University of Hamburg alacam</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>staron</addr-line>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>38</fpage>
      <lpage>46</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Situated language processing in humans involves the interaction of linguistic and visual processing and this cross-modal integration helps resolving ambiguities and predicting what will be revealed next in an unfolding sentence. However, most state-of-the-art parsing approaches rely solely on the language modality. This paper aims to introduce a new multimodal data-set (containing sentences and respective images and audio files) addressing challenging linguistic and visual complexities, which state-of-the-art parsers should be able to cope with. It also briefly addresses a proof-of-concept study that shows the contribution of employing external visual information during disambiguation.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        A better understanding of human perceptual and
comprehension processes concerning multi-modal
environments is one of the crucial factors for
realizing dynamic human-computer interaction. A
large body of empirical evidence in
psycholinguistics suggests that human language processing
successfully integrates available information
acquired from different modalities in order to
resolve linguistic ambiguities (i.e. syntactic,
semantic or discourse) and predict what will be
revealed next in the unfolding sentence
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref15 ref7">(Tanenhaus
et al., 1995; Altmann and Kamide, 1999;
Knoeferle, 2005)</xref>
        . During spoken communication,
online disambiguation and prediction processes
allow us to have more accurate and fluent
conversations. In contrast, state-of-the-art parsing
algorithms are still far away from that accuracy and
fluency when it comes to challenging linguistic
or visual situations. Therefore, by developing a
cross-modal parser to exploit visual knowledge,
we expect to enhance syntactic disambiguation,
e.g. concerning relative clause attachments and
various scope ambiguities.
      </p>
      <p>
        One of the most frequently investigated
syntactic ambiguity cases is the prepositional phrase (PP)
attachment ambiguity, where different semantic
interpretations are possible depending on
assigning different thematic roles
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">(Tanenhaus et al.,
1995)</xref>
        . A well-known example is the imperative
sentence: “put the apple on the towel in the box”,
where the PP “on the towel” can be interpreted as
modifier of an apple (as location of the apple), as
marked in 1 below, or as goal location as in 2.
[1] put [the apple on the towel]obj [in the
box]goal
[2] put [the apple]obj [on the towel in the
box]goal
The re-analysis of the interpretation during
online language comprehension is termed as
gardenpath example. In a multi-modal setting where the
scene contains an empty towel or an apple on a
towel, the visual information constrains the
referential choices as well as the possible
interpretations, helping the disambiguation process.
      </p>
      <p>
        Tanenhaus and his colleagues’ study (1995)
showed that visual information influences
incremental thematic role disambiguation by
narrowing down the possible interpretations. Further
evidence that supports this conclusion was provided
by Knoeferle (2005) by addressing relatively more
complex scenes containing more agents and
relations for both English and German. The
results also indicated that this influence occurs
independent from the experiment language.
Furthermore, Altmann and Kamide (1999)’s study
has documented that listeners are able to predict
complements of a verb based on its selectional
constraints. For example, when people hear the
verb ’break’, their attention is directed towards
only breakable objects in the scene. Some nouns
may also produce expectations for certain
semantic classes of verbs by activating so-called event
schema knowledge
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(McRae et al., 2001)</xref>
        .
Beside verbs and nouns, Van Berkum et al. (2005)’s
study also showed the effect of syntactic gender
cues for Dutch in the anticipation of the
upcoming words. Similar to German, pre-nominal
adjectives as well as nouns are gender-marked in
Dutch and the gender of the adjective has to agree
with the gender of the noun. Their results showed
that the human language processing system uses
the gender cue, when it becomes available, to
predict the target object if its gender is different than
the gender of the other objects in the
environment. They interpreted this as evidence for the
incremental nature of the human language system,
which can predict the upcoming words and
immediately begin incremental parsing operations. In a
more recent work, Coco and Keller (2015)
investigated the language - vision interaction and how
it influences the interpretation of syntactically
ambiguous sentences in a simple but real-world
setting. Their study provided further evidence that
visual and linguistic information influences the
interpretation of a sentence at different points
during online processing. The aforementioned
empirical studies provided insights regarding
psycholinguistically plausible parsing. However, those
studies were limited to simple (written)
linguistic or visual stimuli where object-action relations
could be predicted relatively easily.
      </p>
      <p>Based on the prior research, our project
focuses also on studying underlying mechanisms
of human cross-modal language processing of
incrementally revealed utterances with
accompanying visual scenes, with the aim of using the
empirically gained insights to develop a
psycholinguistically plausible cross-modal and
incremental syntactic parser which can be implemented
e.g. on a service robot. A parser that processes
only linguistic information is expected to be able
to successfully handle syntactically unambiguous
cases by using linguistic constraints or statistical
methods. However, without external information
from visual modality, neither humans nor parsers
can resolve references in syntactically ambiguous
cases. They may have preferences but the
accuracy of the preferences are bounded by chance. On
the other hand, humans naturally use external
information from other modalities for
disambiguation when available. Incorporating this feature,
cross-modal parsers may also resolve those
ambiguities and reach correct interpretations of the
visually depicted events. Therefore, a better
understanding of human language processing
concerning cross-model environments is one of the
crucial factors in the realization of dynamic
humancomputer interaction. Furthermore, comparing the
performance of the computational model with
human performance (e. g. whether ambiguities
were resolved correctly, at which point of a
spoken utterance a correct resolution was achieved,
how many changes were made before reaching
the correct thematic role assignment) also
provides valuable information about the
plausibility and the effectiveness of the proposed
parsing architecture. Constructing a data-set that
contains challenging linguistic and visual cases and
complex multi-modal settings, where
state-of-theart parsers often fail, are fundamental towards
achieving this ultimate goal. In this paper, we
aim to introduce a multi-modal data-set
consisting of garden-path (fully/temporally syntactically
ambiguous) sentences.</p>
      <p>This paper is structured as follows. In section
2, a data-set of ambiguous German sentences and
their multi-modal representations are presented. A
brief description of our cross-modal parser is
presented in Section 3. Section 3 also addresses a
test run conducted on fully ambiguous sentence
structures. Section 4 summarizes the results of this
work and draws conclusions
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Linguistic and Visual Complexities</title>
      <p>
        Recently, a corpus of language and vision
ambiguities (LAVA) in English has been released
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">(Berzak
et al., 2016)</xref>
        . LAVA corpus contains 237
sentences with linguistic ambiguities that can only be
disambiguated using external visual information
provided as short videos or static visual images
with real world complexity. It addresses a wide
range of syntactic ambiguities including
prepositional phrase or verb phrase attachments and
ambiguities in the interpretation of conjunctions.
However, this corpus does not take linguistically
challenging cases like relative clause attachments
or scope ambiguities, which may also give
valuable insights understanding the underlying
mechanisms of cross-modal interactions, into account.
To our knowledge, the reference resolution
concerning these linguistic cases and the effect of
linguistic complexity in visually disambiguated
situations have been scarcely investigated. Our
multimodal data-set consists of challenging linguistic
cases in German (itemized below), which becomes
fully unambiguous in the presence of visual
stimuli. Our main question from the psycholinguistic
point of view is whether the presence of linguistic
ambiguity and the linguistic complexity affect the
processing of multi-modal stimuli. On the other
hand, from the computational perspective, we
focus on whether and to what extent visual
information is useful for the disambiguation and structural
prediction processes in order to develop more
fluent and accurate computational parsing.
      </p>
      <p>German has three grammatical genders, namely
each noun is either feminine(f), masculine(m), or
neuter(n). In a sentence that contains a relative
clause attachment, the gender of the relative
pronoun has to be the same as the gender of its
antecedent. Sentence [3] illustrates an example,
which contains a relative clause licensing the NP.
the window of the room that he cleans.)</p>
      <p>Our data-set is currently consisting of 191
sentences1 and addresses 8 linguistically
challenging cases concerning relative clause attachments,
agent/patient agreement, verb/subject agreement,
and scope ambiguities for conjunctions and
negations. The sentence sets for each structure are
generated by using part-of-speech templates given in
Table 1. Parsers often have problems with
correct reference resolution for such linguistic
expressions because they usually attach the relative
clause to a nearest option with respect to
statistical distributions in their training data or explicitly
stated rules.</p>
      <p>Knoeferle’s (2005) sentence set was used as
baseline since the co-occurrence frequencies
between the action and the Agent in the
sentence, as well as between the action and the
Patient, were controlled to single out the effect
of semantic associations or preferences during
parsing operations. For a syntactic parser, this
may seem irrelevant, however in order to develop
a comparable experimental setup for human
comprehension, this parameter needs to be taken
into account.</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>Fully Ambiguous Sentence Structures</title>
        <p>[3] Sie schmu¨ckt das Fenster(n), das(n) er
sa¨ubert. (She decorates the window that
he cleans.)</p>
        <p>In Sentence [4], the NP is modified by an
additional NP, i.e. a genitive object. In this case,
since the gender of the relative pronoun matches
only the first NP, it is clear that the window is
being cleaned, not the car. However, due to
ambiguous German case-marking, if the genders of the
nouns of both NPs are the same, as in sentence [5], [2] RPA - Scope Ambiguities
both far and near attachments are possible. Fur- Ich sehe A¨ pfel(pl) und Bananen(pl), die(pl) auf
thermore, the verb is semantically congruent with dem Tisch liegen.
both NP and PP as well. Correct reference resolu- I see apples and bananas that lie on the table.
tion can not be achieved based on linguistic infor- Int.1: Both apples and bananas are on the table.
mation alone. On the other hand, having access to Int.2: Only bananas are on the table.
visual information eliminates other interpretations
and it favors only one assuming there will be no
ambiguity in the visual modality (see Figure 1 and
2).
[1] RPA2 - a Genitive NP</p>
        <p>Sie schmu¨ckt das Fenster(n) des Zimmers(n),
das er sa¨ubere.</p>
        <p>She decorates the window of the room that he
cleans.</p>
        <p>Int.13: He cleans the room (near-attachment).</p>
        <p>Int.2: He cleans the window (far-attachment).
[4] Sie schmu¨ckt das Fenster(n) des
Wagens(m), das(n) er sa¨ubert. (She decorates
the window of the car that he cleans.)
[5] Sie schmu¨ckt das Fenster(n) des
Zimmers(n), das(n) er sa¨ubert. (She decorates
[3] RPA - a Dative PP</p>
        <p>Da befindet sich ein Becher(m) auf einem
Tisch(m), den(m) sie bescha¨digt.</p>
        <p>It is the mug on the table that she damages.</p>
        <p>Int.1: She damages the table (near-attachment).</p>
        <p>Int.2: She damages the mug (far-attachment).</p>
        <p>1The short-term goal is to increase the sample size to 450
sentences.</p>
        <p>2Relative Pronoun Agreement
3Int.=Interpretation
SUBJ</p>
        <p>OBJA</p>
        <p>DET</p>
        <p>GMOD</p>
        <p>DET</p>
        <p>REL
Sie schmückt das Fenster des Zimmers, das</p>
        <p>eOrBJA SUsBäJubert.</p>
        <p>gender. Below, three additional types of
temporal ambiguities, which are convenient for the
investigation of how/when structural prediction
mechanisms are employed during parsing process
are presented.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>Temporally Ambiguous Sentence Structures</title>
        <p>[6] Agent-Patient Agreement (following the
dataset designed by Knoeferle (2005))
• Die Arbeiterin kostu¨miert mal eben den
jungen Mann.</p>
        <p>The worker(f) just dresses up the joung
man(m).
• Die Arbeiterin verko¨stigt mal eben der
Astronaut.</p>
        <p>The worker(f) is just fed4 by the
astronaut(m).</p>
        <p>All the sentence structures for the fully am- [7] Verb-Subject Agreement
biguous set (except negative scope sentences)
presented above can be also transformed to
temporally ambiguous sentence structures by
changing the noun in either of the NPs (or PPs)
with another noun that has an article in different
• Die Sa¨nger waschen den Arzt.</p>
        <p>The singers wash the doctor(m).</p>
        <p>4The original German sentence is in active voice in OVS
word order.
• Die Sa¨nger wa¨scht der Offizier.</p>
        <p>The singers are painted 4 by the officer(m).
[8] Conjunction Scope Ambiguities
• Die Sa¨ngerin bemalt den Offizier und die</p>
        <p>A¨ rztin.</p>
        <p>The singer(f) paints the officer(m) and the
doctor(f).
• Die Sa¨ngerin bemalt den Offizier und die</p>
        <p>A¨ rztin wa¨scht den Radfahrer.</p>
        <p>The singer(f) paints the officer(m) and the
doctor(f) washes the cyclist(m).
• Die Sa¨ngerin bemalt den Offizier und die</p>
        <p>A¨ rztin bespru¨ht der Radfahrer.</p>
        <p>The singer(f) paints the officer(m) and the
doctor(f) is sprayed4 by the cyclist(m).</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>2.1 Image Construction and Visual</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-4">
        <title>Complexity</title>
        <p>Besides the effect of linguistic complexity, the
data-set was designed to be used in the
investigation of the following research questions: how,
when and at which degree does visual
complexity affect sentence comprehension and are visual
cues in such a complex linguistic case still strong
enough to enhance correct interpretation.</p>
        <p>The 2D visual scenes were created with the
SketchUp Make Software5 and all 3D objects were
exported from the original SketchUp 3D
Warehouse. The images were set to 1250 x 840
resolution. Moreover, target objects and agents are
located in different parts of the visual scene for
each stimulus. It should be reminded that for the
computational model, we do not need visual
depictions, their semantic representations are
sufficient, however the visual depictions are crucial to
conduct comparable experimental studies with
human subjects. Furthermore, an automatic
extraction of semantic roles from the images is another
task that we are aiming for. That is the reason why
not just semantic representations but the images
themselves are integral part of our data-set.</p>
        <p>The following figures illustrate how
complexity is systematically controlled on one of the cases
in the data-set, namely Agent-Patient agreement.</p>
        <p>In the initial/original case, each scenario contains
three characters (one Patient, one Agent and one
ambiguous Agent/Patient character) and two
possible actions. On the other hand each sentence</p>
        <p>
          5http://http://www.sketchup.com/
03.08.2016
retrieved
on
addresses only one action and two characters, see
sentences in [6]. For each scenario, four different
complexity levels were designed. In the first
condition, a visual scene contains three characters in
an environment, where there is no additional
background object, see Figure 3. This set-up
resemblances Knoeferle’s (2005) images and provides a
baseline to compare our results with previous
research. The images in the second condition also
contain three characters, but in an environment
with noninteracting distractor objects, see
Figure4. In the last two conditions, a fourth character in
an Agent role, who acts on the ambiguous
character is added to the scene. While the images in the
third condition do not have additional objects , the
images in the fourth condition are in a cluttered
environment as in the condition 2 (see Figure 5 and
Figure 6). It should be noted that background
objects and the fourth character do not have any
semantic association with the actions mentioned in
the sentences. Besides, visual complexities can be
further diversified, e.g. by adding another patient
character to the scene or by adding semantically
congruent distractor objects.
The objects, characters and actions in the images
were annotated manually with respect to their
semantic roles, similar to McCrae’s approach
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">(McCrae, 2010)</xref>
          , see also Mayberry et al. (2006).
Semantic roles are used to establish a relation
between semantic and syntactic levels as an
important part of modeling the cross-modal interaction.
        </p>
        <p>Semantic roles are linguistic abstractions to
distinguish and classify the different functions of
1 RPA with a Genitive NP
2 RPA Scope Ambiguities PROnom VP1 NP1nom,pl. NP1nom,pl., WDT acc,pl.</p>
        <p>VP2 PP1
3 RPA with a Dative-PP NPit cleft VP1 NP1nom NP2dat, WDT dat</p>
        <p>PRO3rd-sing. ADV VP2
4 RPA Ambiguous Gender EX Vaux NP1nom WDTnom NP2acc ADV VP1
Case Marking</p>
        <p>EX Vaux NP1nom, WDTacc NP2acc ADV VP1
5 Negative Scope Ambigui- NP1nom VP1 NP2acc NEG, Conj. PROnom ADJ
ties VP2
6 Agent Patient Agreement NP1nom VP NP2acc
(all in 3rd P. Sing.)
7 Verb Subject Agreement
8 Conjunction Scope
Ambiguities
(all in 3rd P. Sing.)
TOTAL</p>
        <p>N1acc V N2nom
NP1nom-3rd Pl. VP 3rd Pl. NP2acc-3rd Sing.</p>
        <p>NP1acc-3rd Pl. V 3rd Sing. NP2nom-3rd Sing.</p>
        <p>NP1nom VP1 NP2acc Conj. NP3acc
N1nom VP1 NP2acc Conj. NP3nom VP2 NP4acc
NP1nom VP1 NP2acc Conj. NP3acc VP2 NP4nom
# of unique items
# of
sample
Pro(3),
NPacc/dat(72)
NPs(44),
ADV(24)
NPs(30),
ADV(12)</p>
        <p>VP(36), 24
VP(23), 20</p>
        <p>VP(20), 24
NPs(6), VP(6), 12
ADJ(12), ADV(6)
NPs(37), VP(48), 48
ADV(6)
NPs(3), VP(6), ADV(6) 12
NPs(32),
ADV(6)</p>
        <p>VP(27), 27
191
the action in an utterance, in other words they
are a useful tool to specify “who did what to
whom”. The most common set of semantic roles
includes Agent, Theme, Patient, Instrument,
Location, Goal and Path. Figure 7 shows one
exemplary semantic annotation for the visual scene
displayed in Figure 1. There “Sie” is the Agent, who
performs the decorating action, “das Fenster” is
the Patient, the entity undergoing a change of state,
caused by the action.</p>
        <p>To wrap-up, the current version of our
multimodal data-set in German that we constructed with
the aim of studying disambiguation and structural
prediction from both psycholinguistics and
computational linguistics perspectives contains
following items for each scenario in the data-set 6
• a linguistic form and a sentence in German</p>
        <p>with its English translation
• gold standard annotations
• possible interpretations
• a target interpretation
• a visual depiction of the target interpretation in</p>
        <p>four different visual complexities
• a semantic representation of the visual
depic</p>
        <p>tion of the target interpretation
• an audio file and a data file with marked
onset/offsets (in msec.) of each linguistic entities
in the sentence
3</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Cross-modal Parsing</title>
      <p>As suggested by the literature mentioned in
Section 1, cross-modal integration facilitates to
resolve ambiguities and predict what will be
revealed next in an unfolding sentence.
However, most state-of-the-art parsing approaches rely
solely on the language modality. McCrae (2009)
proposed a system for the integration of
contextual knowledge into a rule-based syntactic and
semantic parser to resolve ambiguities in
German, e.g. Genitive-Dative ambiguity of feminine
nouns or PP attachment ambiguities. Baumga¨rtner
et al. (2012) extended that system by adding
incremental processing capabilities leading to the only
cross-modal and incremental syntactic parser so
far. In their study of visually guided natural
language processing, Baumga¨rtner et al. (2012)
propose a computational model that successfully
integrates visual context to improve the processing
of sentences of German, and semantic
information derived from language input that is used to
6The data-set can be accessed from https://
gitlab.com/natsCML/SIMBig2017
guide the parser to find the correct referent in the
description of visual context.</p>
      <p>
        However, in contrast to those rule-based parsers
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref2">(McCrae, 2009; Baumga¨rtner et al., 2012)</xref>
        , we
employ statistical parsing with the aim to achieve
state-of-the-art results and developing a
languageindependent parser. To realize cross-modality,
we interface the data-driven parser (RBGParser,
Zhang et al. (2014)), which is utilized to search
for the most plausible disambiguation of a given
sentence among all possible dependency trees,
with a rule-based component (jwcdg, Beuck et al.
(2011)), which evaluates possible analyses
produced by RBG with respect to the visual
knowledge. This contextual information guides the
parsing process and narrows down the hypotheses
towards the most plausible representation for a given
sentence.
      </p>
      <p>
        Another approach that could have been used is
to train a parser on combined linguistic and
visual features
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">(Salama and Menzel, 2016)</xref>
        .
However, due to lack of available data to train the
parser with, RBG is not dedicated to process the
contextual information in our approach. Instead,
we embed a constraint-based component that is
able to evaluate a dependency tree based on
symbolic knowledge, i. e. the semantic role
annotations. jwcdg is utilized to link the semantic roles
that the visual scenes are annotated with and the
syntactic level of RBG. For example, the Agent
of an active sentence is supposed to be its
Subject. Instead of developing a full grammar that
covers all relations between every semantic role
and the syntactic level, our grammar covers the
cases relevant with respect to our test data and has
been developed for German only. But, our
grammar will be extended to further cases during the
remainder of this project. Also, we plan to
extended it to English, Turkish and Chinese. To the
best of our knowledge, there exists no comparable
system for cross-modal broad-coverage syntactic
parsing yet. Since we aim to introduce the corpus
of fully/temporally ambiguous sentences in
German, more technical aspects of the current parser
have been left out of scope here.
3.1
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>A Test Run</title>
        <p>This section presents the results of our
proof-ofconcept test run, where the performance of our
developed cross-modal parser has been tested and
compared with the performance of the original
RBG model in order to see whether the contextual
information improves parsing results.</p>
        <p>Our task for the computational model in this test
run is to assign thematic roles correctly with
respect to the visual depiction of the event.
Therefore, the disambiguation task was performed by
the cross-modal parser on fully ambiguous
sentence (see Table 1, Type [1 - 4], 108 sentences in
total). For each sentence, the corresponding
visual stimulus has been manually annotated as
described in Subsection 2.2.</p>
        <p>
          The RBG models had been trained on the first
100k sentences of the Hamburg Dependency
Treebank (HDT)
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">(Foth et al., 2014)</xref>
          part A, a German
corpus that is freely available for research
purposes. All sentences, which are from the
German news website Heise Online7, are manually
dependecy-annotated. TurboTagger8 is used to
predict the PoS tags, from the tag set of Schiller
et al. (1995), instead of using the gold standard
ones.
        </p>
        <p>RPA-Genitive (Type [1]) case involves 24
sentences. In one half of it, the relative clause is
attached to the first NP, far attachment, and in the
other half, it is attached to genitive object, near
attachment. The original RBG was not able to
attach relative clauses correctly in all 12 cases of far
attachment, while there was no wrong attachment
in the case of near-attachments as expected due to
the respective statistical distribution in the training
data. In contrast, our cross-modal parser was able
to attach all relative-clauses correctly by utilizing
external contextual information.</p>
        <p>RPA-Scope (Type[2]) is also consisting of 24
sentences; in one half, relative clause is attached to
both NPs (wide scope), while it is attached to only
the closest NP in the rest (narrow-scope). A
similar pattern in the parsing results as in the previous
case was observed. While the original RBG was
not able to make any correct attachment for the
wide-scope cases, our model correctly attached all
relative clauses.</p>
        <p>RPA-Dative (Type [3]) set contains 20
sentences; one half is far-attached and the other half is
near-attached. The previous pattern was again
observed in this case. While the original RBG was
blind to far-attachments, our parser was able to
disambiguate the sentences by using external cues.</p>
        <p>
          In case of RC-gender, RBG attached all agents
7https://www.heise.de
8TurboTagger is distributed together with TurboParser
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">(Martins et al., 2013)</xref>
          and patients correctly but with wrong syntactic
labels in 20 out of 40 cases. Our cross-modal
parser improved those results by labeling only 10
agent/patients wrongly. The performance of this is
expected to be improved by fine-tuning of the
semantic annotations employed during parsing
operations.
4
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Discussion</title>
      <p>Which linguistic entity resolves the ambiguities
under different ambiguity and complexity
conditions by humans gives us valuable
information about the underlying mechanism of
languagevision interaction in a situated setting, enabling
us to improve a psycho-linguistically plausible
parser. However, for designing such a parser, in
addition to reach an understanding in two
endeavors, namely the cognitive aspects of language
processing and technical aspects of parsing
technology, the multi-modal data-set that pertains very
challenging garden-path (fully or temporally
ambiguous) cases for both areas in a systematic way
needs to be designed carefully. This paper
addresses this bridging component.</p>
      <p>Here we introduce a multi-modal set6 for
ambiguous German sentences addressing 8 different
linguistic and four different visual complexities.
Furthermore, the contribution of the external
information in parsing operations was shown by a
proof-of concept study. Further studies will
address the comparison between performance of
human subjects and computational model on both
disambiguation and structural predictions tasks
concerning the entire data-set.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>This research was funded by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) in project “Crossmodal
Learning”, TRR-169.</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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