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On Homophony and Rényi Entropy ...
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Abstract:
Homophony’s widespread presence in natural languages is a controversial topic. Recent theories of language optimality have tried to justify its prevalence, despite its negative effects on cognitive processing time, e.g., Piantadosi et al. (2012) argued homophony enables the reuse of efficient wordforms and is thus beneficial for languages. This hypothesis has recently been challenged by Trott and Bergen (2020), who posit that good wordforms are more often homophonous simply because they are more phonotactically probable. In this paper, we join in on the debate. We first propose a new information-theoretic quantification of a language’s homophony: the sample Rényi entropy. Then, we use this quantification to revisit Trott and Bergen’s claims. While their point is theoretically sound, a specific methodological issue in their experiments raises doubts about their results. After addressing this issue, we find no clear pressure either towards or against homophony—a much more nuanced result than either Piantadosi ... : Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing ...
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URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000518993
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/518993
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A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages ...
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What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law ...
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Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form–Meaning Associations ...
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| 13 |
Modeling the Unigram Distribution
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In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (2021)
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What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law
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In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2021)
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| 15 |
Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form–Meaning Associations
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In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2021)
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| 16 |
A Non-Linear Structural Probe
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In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2021)
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| 17 |
Disambiguatory Signals are Stronger in Word-initial Positions
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In: Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume (2021)
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| 18 |
How (Non-)Optimal is the Lexicon?
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In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2021)
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| 19 |
A Bayesian Framework for Information-Theoretic Probing
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In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2021)
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