@inproceedings{lemke-etal-2017-optimal,
    title = "Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines",
    author = "Lemke, Robin  and
      Horch, Eva  and
      Reich, Ingo",
    editor = "Lapata, Mirella  and
      Blunsom, Phil  and
      Koller, Alexander",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers",
    month = apr,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Valencia, Spain",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/E17-2021/",
    pages = "131--135",
    abstract = "In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the distribution of article omission specifically is constrained by principles of Information Theory (Shannon 1948). In particular, Information Theory predicts a stronger preference for article omission before nouns which are relatively unpredictable in context of the preceding words. We investigated article omission in German newspaper headlines with a corpus and acceptability rating study. Both support our hypothesis: Articles are inserted more often before unpredictable nouns and subjects perceive article omission before predictable nouns as more well-formed than before unpredictable ones. This suggests that information theoretic principles constrain the distribution of article omission in headlines."
}