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The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis posits a preference among language users for utterances structured such that information is distributed uniformly across a signal. While its implications on language production have been well…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Clara Meister , Tiago Pimentel , Patrick Haller , Lena Jäger , Ryan Cotterell , Roger Levy

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Eleftheria Tsipidi , Franz Nowak , Ryan Cotterell , Ethan Wilcox , Mario Giulianelli , Alex Warstadt

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Eleftheria Tsipidi , Samuel Kiegeland , Franz Nowak , Tianyang Xu , Ethan Wilcox , Alex Warstadt , Ryan Cotterell , Mario Giulianelli

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers are subject to a communicative pressure to distribute information evenly within utterances, minimising surprisal variance. While this hypothesis has been tested…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Matteo Gay , Coleman Haley , Mario Giulianelli , Edoardo Ponti

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis proposes that effective communication is achieved by maintaining a stable flow of information. In this work, we revisit this principle in the context of Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Minju Gwak , Guijin Son , Jaehyung Kim

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which posits that speakers behaving optimally tend to distribute information uniformly across a linguistic signal, has gained traction in psycholinguistics as an explanation for certain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Jason Wei , Clara Meister , Ryan Cotterell

Constant entropy rate (conditional entropies must remain constant as the sequence length increases) and uniform information density (conditional probabilities must remain constant as the sequence length increases) are two information…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2014-12-03 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Łukasz Dębowski , Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín

Humans tend to follow the Uniform Information Density (UID) principle by distributing information evenly in utterances. We study if decoding algorithms implicitly follow this UID principle, and under what conditions adherence to UID might…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Saranya Venkatraman , He He , David Reitter

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Hailin Hao , Elsi Kaiser

Balanced and efficient information flow is essential for optimizing language generation models. In this work, we propose Entropy-UID, a new token selection method that balances entropy and Uniform Information Density (UID) principles for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Xinpeng Shou

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Ella Rabinovich

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Thomas Hikaru Clark , Clara Meister , Tiago Pimentel , Michael Hahn , Ryan Cotterell , Richard Futrell , Roger Levy

The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-06-23 Christian Bentz , Dimitrios Alikaniotis

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jessica Lin , Amir Zeldes

The Uniform Information Density (UID) principle posits that humans prefer to spread information evenly during language production. We examine if this UID principle can help capture differences between Large Language Models (LLMs)-generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Saranya Venkatraman , Adaku Uchendu , Dongwon Lee

Four estimators of the directed information rate between a pair of jointly stationary ergodic finite-alphabet processes are proposed, based on universal probability assignments. The first one is a Shannon--McMillan--Breiman type estimator,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-15 Jiantao Jiao , Haim H. Permuter , Lei Zhao , Young-Han Kim , Tsachy Weissman

Sentence is a basic linguistic unit, however, little is known about how information content is distributed across different positions of a sentence. Based on authentic language data of English, the present study calculated the entropy and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Shuiyuan Yu , Jin Cong , Junying Liang , Haitao Liu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-03-05 Marcelo A Montemurro , Damián H Zanette

We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-02-15 Eduardo G. Altmann , Laercio Dias , Martin Gerlach

Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Aryaman Arora , Clara Meister , Ryan Cotterell
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