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 syntactic reduction


That's Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of "that" Omission in English Subordinate Clauses

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

First, effectiveness of their utterances when faced with we extend the investigation to a much larger corpus multiple options for structuring a message. The of informal written English collected from social UID hypothesis (Frank and Jaeger, 2008; Collins, media. Second, we use contemporary large language 2014; Hahn et al., 2020) suggests that speakers models (LLMs) to estimate the operationalizations tend to spread information evenly throughout an of information uniformity in syntactic reduction, utterance, avoiding large fluctuations in the perunit suggesting the robustness of our findings.


Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction

Neural Information Processing Systems

If language users are rational, they might choose to structure their utterances so as to optimize communicative properties. In particular, information-theoretic and psycholinguistic considerations suggest that this may include maximizing the uniformity of information density in an utterance. We investigate this possibility in the context of syntactic reduction, where the speaker has the option of either marking a higher-order unit (a phrase) with an extra word, or leaving it unmarked. We demonstrate that speakers are more likely to reduce less information-dense phrases. In a second step, we combine a stochastic model of structured utterance production with a logistic-regression model of syntactic reduction to study which types of cues speakers employ when estimating the predictability of upcoming elements.


Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction

Neural Information Processing Systems

If language users are rational, they might choose to structure their utterances so as to optimize communicative properties. In particular, information-theoretic and psycholinguistic considerations suggest that this may include maximizing the uniformity of information density in an utterance. We investigate this possibility in the context of syntactic reduction, where the speaker has the option of either marking a higher-order unit (a phrase) with an extra word, or leaving it unmarked. We demonstrate that speakers are more likely to reduce less information-dense phrases. In a second step, we combine a stochastic model of structured utterance production with a logistic-regression model of syntactic reduction to study which types of cues speakers employ when estimating the predictability of upcoming elements. We demonstrate that the trend toward predictability-sensitive syntactic reduction (Jaeger, 2006) is robust in the face of a wide variety of control variables, and present evidence that speakers use both surface and structural cues for predictability estimation.


Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction

Neural Information Processing Systems

If language users are rational, they might choose to structure their utterances so as to optimize communicative properties. In particular, information-theoretic and psycholinguistic considerations suggest that this may include maximizing the uniformity of information density in an utterance. We investigate this possibility in the context of syntactic reduction, where the speaker has the option of either marking a higher-order unit (a phrase) with an extra word, or leaving it unmarked. We demonstrate that speakers are more likely to reduce less information-dense phrases. In a second step, we combine a stochastic model of structured utterance production with a logistic-regression model of syntactic reduction to study which types of cues speakers employ when estimating the predictability of upcoming elements. We demonstrate that the trend toward predictability-sensitive syntactic reduction (Jaeger, 2006) is robust in the face of a wide variety of control variables, and present evidence that speakers use both surface and structural cues for predictability estimation.


Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction

Neural Information Processing Systems

If language users are rational, they might choose to structure their utterances so as to optimize communicative properties. In particular, information-theoretic and psycholinguistic considerations suggest that this may include maximizing the uniformity ofinformation density in an utterance. We investigate this possibility in the context of syntactic reduction, where the speaker has the option of either marking a higher-order unit (a phrase) with an extra word, or leaving it unmarked. We demonstrate that speakers are more likely to reduce less information-dense phrases. In a second step, we combine a stochastic model of structured utterance production with a logistic-regression model of syntactic reduction to study which types of cues speakers employ when estimating the predictability of upcoming elements. We demonstrate that the trend toward predictability-sensitive syntactic reduction (Jaeger, 2006) is robust in the face of a wide variety of control variables, andpresent evidence that speakers use both surface and structural cues for predictability estimation.