ACCoRD: A Multi-Document Approach to Generating Diverse Descriptions of Scientific Concepts

Systems that can automatically define unfamiliar terms hold the promise of improving the accessibility of scientific texts, especially for readers who may lack prerequisite background knowledge. However, current systems assume a single "best" description per concept, which fails to account for the many potentially useful ways a concept can be described. We present ACCoRD, an end-to-end system tackling the novel task of generating sets of descriptions of scientific concepts. Our system takes advantage of the myriad ways a concept is mentioned across the scientific literature to produce distinct, diverse descriptions of target scientific concepts in terms of different reference concepts. To support research on the task, we release an expert-annotated resource, the ACCoRD corpus, which includes 1,275 labeled contexts and 1,787 hand-authored concept descriptions. We conduct a user study demonstrating that (1) users prefer descriptions produced by our end-to-end system, and (2) users prefer multiple descriptions to a single "best" description.

Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task

There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or \emph{lexical priors}, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.