Related papers: Information Density as a Factor for Variation in t…
Many computational linguistic methods have been proposed to study the information content of languages. We consider two interesting research questions: 1) how is information distributed over long documents, and 2) how does content…
Speakers often have multiple ways to express the same meaning. The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis suggests that speakers exploit this variability to maintain a consistent rate of information transmission during language…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
We use paraphrases as a unique source of data to analyze contextualized embeddings, with a particular focus on BERT. Because paraphrases naturally encode consistent word and phrase semantics, they provide a unique lens for investigating…
In this paper, we consider contextual stochastic optimization problems under endogenous uncertainty, where decisions affect the underlying distributions. To implement such decisions in practice, it is crucial to ensure that their outcomes…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
Despite the recent popularity of word embedding methods, there is only a small body of work exploring the limitations of these representations. In this paper, we consider one aspect of embedding spaces, namely their stability. We show that…
We investigate the relationship between the frequency with which verbs are found in particular subcategorization frames and the acceptability of those verbs in those frames, focusing in particular on subordinate clause-taking verbs, such as…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…
Previous work examining the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis has shown that while information as measured by surprisal metrics is distributed more or less evenly across documents overall, local discrepancies can arise due to…
To be discoverable in an embedding-based search process, each part of a document should be reflected in its embedding representation. To quantify any potential reflection biases, we introduce a permutation-based evaluation framework. With…
Surprisal theory posits that the cognitive effort required to comprehend a word is determined by its contextual predictability, quantified as surprisal. Traditionally, surprisal theory treats words as distinct entities, overlooking any…
Word embeddings capture semantic relationships based on contextual information and are the basis for a wide variety of natural language processing applications. Notably these relationships are solely learned from the data and subsequently…
Following the recent success of word embeddings, it has been argued that there is no such thing as an ideal representation for words, as different models tend to capture divergent and often mutually incompatible aspects like…
Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to…
Categorical compositional distributional model of Coecke et al. (2010) suggests a way to combine grammatical composition of the formal, type logical models with the corpus based, empirical word representations of distributional semantics.…
The density of a rational language can be understood as the frequency of some "pattern" in the shift space, for example a pattern like "words with an even number of a given letter." We study the density of group languages, i.e. rational…
In mathematics information is a number that measures uncertainty (entropy) based on a probabilistic distribution, often of an obscure origin. In real life language information is a datum, a statement, more precisely, a formula. But such a…