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.- Anthology ID:
- E17-2021
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Valencia, Spain
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 131–135
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/E17-2021
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Robin Lemke, Eva Horch, and Ingo Reich. 2017. Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 131–135, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines (Lemke et al., EACL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/E17-2021.pdf