Related papers: Is Surprisal in Issue Trackers Actionable?
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically…
The effect of surprisal on processing difficulty has been a central topic of investigation in psycholinguistics. Here, we use eyetracking data to examine three language processing regimes that are common in daily life but have not been…
An issue tracker is a software tool used by organisations to interact with users and manage various aspects of the software development lifecycle. With the rise of agile methodologies, issue trackers have become popular in open and…
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…
Software development tasks must be performed successfully to achieve software quality and customer satisfaction. Knowing whether software tasks are likely to fail is essential to ensure the success of software projects. Issue Tracking…
Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…
Anomaly detection methods are widely used but often rely on ad hoc rules or strong assumptions, and they often focus on tail events, missing ``inlier'' anomalies that occur in low-density gaps between modes. We propose a unified framework…
Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…
We present a new perspective on how readers integrate context during real-time language comprehension. Our proposals build on surprisal theory, which posits that the processing effort of a linguistic unit (e.g., a word) is an affine…
This paper investigates the use of word surprisal, a measure of the predictability of a word in a given context, as a feature to aid speech synthesis prosody. We explore how word surprisal extracted from large language models (LLMs)…
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…
We investigate the extent to which word surprisal can be used to predict a neural measure of human language processing difficulty - the N400. To do this, we use recurrent neural networks to calculate the surprisal of stimuli from previously…
Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language…
Human reading behavior is sensitive to surprisal: more predictable words tend to be read faster. Unexpectedly, this applies not only to the surprisal of the word that is currently being read, but also to the surprisal of upcoming…
Software security incidents occur everyday and thousands of software security reports are announced each month. Thus, it is difficult for software security researchers, engineers, and other stakeholders to follow software security topics of…
The increasing complexity of modern software systems has made understanding their behavior increasingly challenging, driving the need for explainability to improve transparency and user trust. Traditional documentation is often outdated or…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…