14 research outputs found
A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order
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 these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual
word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such
investigations: the uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds
that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask
whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns
cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether
real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders.
In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i)
among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than
reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual
orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are
compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and
usage of natural languages
Analyzing Wrap-Up Effects through an Information-Theoretic Lens
Numerous analyses of reading time (RT) data have been implemented -- all in
an effort to better understand the cognitive processes driving reading
comprehension. However, data measured on words at the end of a sentence -- or
even at the end of a clause -- is often omitted due to the confounding factors
introduced by so-called "wrap-up effects," which manifests as a skewed
distribution of RTs for these words. Consequently, the understanding of the
cognitive processes that might be involved in these wrap-up effects is limited.
In this work, we attempt to learn more about these processes by examining the
relationship between wrap-up effects and information-theoretic quantities, such
as word and context surprisals. We find that the distribution of information in
prior contexts is often predictive of sentence- and clause-final RTs (while not
of sentence-medial RTs). This lends support to several prior hypotheses about
the processes involved in wrap-up effects.Comment: ACL 2022 (main conference
A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order
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 these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.(1)ISSN:2307-387
Research article - Comet 81P/Wild 2 under a microscope
The Stardust spacecraft collected thousands of particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 and returned them to Earth for laboratory study. The preliminary examination of these samples shows that the nonvolatile portion of the comet is an unequilibrated assortment of materials that have both presolar and solar system origin. The comet contains an abundance of silicate grains that are much larger than predictions of interstellar grain models, and many of these are high-temperature minerals that appear to have formed in the inner regions of the solar nebula. Their presence in a comet proves that the formation of the solar system included mixing on the grandest scales