Psycholinguistics Experiments

The Portal for Psychological Experiments on Language has seven new experiments for May:

• Image Caption Generation: In this experiment you will be presented with a news image, an article associated with the image, and a caption describing the image. Your task is to judge how well the caption describes the content of the image given the accompanying article and how grammatical the caption is. Some captions will seem appropriate to you, but others will not. You will make your judgement by choosing a rating from 1 (the caption is not appropriate) to 7 (the caption is appropriate). All captions were generated automatically by a computer program.

• Human-robot Interaction: You will see a series of pictures of a scene with a robot standing at a table with some objects on it. You will hear the robot asking a question and a human answering it. Every time you will make a judgment about the robot's question. Between robot scenes you will check the correctness of simple calculations.

• Sentence Reading: In this experiment, you will be shown a set of sentences which describe a situation. You will have to read the sentences carefully and answer the questions asked at the end of the sets. Each sentence will appear on a separate slide. You can move to the next slide by clicking anywhere on the slide. At no point will you be able to go back and revisit the contents of the previous slide (please do not use the 'Back' button of the browser as this will take you to the begining of the experiment). On the slide containing the question, you will be given two options as possible answers and you need to select one of them. On selecting the answer, you will be presented with the next set.

• Image Annotation: In this experiment you will be presented with a news image, an article associated with the image, and a set of keywords describing the image. Your task is to judge how well each of the keywords describe the content of the image given the accompanying article. Some keywords will seem appropriate to you, but others will not. You will make your judgement by choosing a rating from 1 (the keywords are not appropriate) to 7 (the words are appropriate). All keywords were generated automatically by a computer program.

• Sentence Compression: In this experiment you will be asked to judge how well a given sentence compresses the meaning of another sentence. You will see a series of sentences together with their compressed versions. Some sentence compressions will seem perfectly OK to you, but others will not. All compressed versions were generated automatically by a computer program.

• Story Generation: In this experiment you will be asked to read a set of short computer generated stories. Each story will be 5 sentences long and will contain only a couple of characters. After reading each story you will assess its quality along three dimensions: fluency, coherence and interest. For each dimension you will provide a rating on a scale from 1 to 5.

• Referring expressions: The goal of this short survey is to collect your opinions about the most natural way to refer to objects in a conversation. Different people might do this in different ways, depending on how they interpret the context in which the dialogue takes place. We are interested in your opinion, given the context described below.

Enjoy!