Paper

A Transparent Model of Syntactic and Semantic Cue-based Retrieval

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Abstract

Human comprehenders have greater difficulty forming pairwise grammatical dependencies in cases where the earlier word competes with a "distractor" to which it is similar. Cue-based retrieval theories (see e.g., Lewis et al., 2006) address this "interference" phenomenon with explicit quantifications of memory retrieval difficulty. We propose a computational model, consistent with Cue-based retrieval, that separately quantifies two different kinds of similarity. A linear combination of the two reproduces the graded interference pattern reported in Van Dyke (2007). This simple account offers a more straightforward mechanistic interpretation than Attention-based predictors from opaque Transformer based models.

Keywords: sentence processing, computational psycholinguistics, cue-based retrieval, model interpretability

How to Cite:

Yue, S. & Hale, J., (2026) “A Transparent Model of Syntactic and Semantic Cue-based Retrieval”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4054