Related papers: A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Informatio…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis states that humans tend to distribute information roughly evenly across an utterance or discourse. Early evidence in support of the UID hypothesis came from Genzel & Charniak (2002), which…
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…
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…
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,…
Word order is an important concept in natural language, and in this work, we study how word order affects the induction of world knowledge from raw text using language models. We use word analogies to probe for such knowledge. Specifically,…
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…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
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…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synthetic word-order variants of natural languages. We observe…
Language models (LMs) may appear insensitive to word order changes in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we propose that linguistic redundancy can explain this phenomenon, whereby word order and other linguistic cues…
Recent studies have shown that language models pretrained and/or fine-tuned on randomly permuted sentences exhibit competitive performance on GLUE, putting into question the importance of word order information. Somewhat…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
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…