Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages

Iuliia Zaitova, Irina Stenger, Muhammad Umer Butt, Tania Avgustinova

Abstract
This study focuses on evaluating and predicting the intelligibility of non-compositional expressions within the context of five closely related Slavic languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian, as perceived by native speakers of Russian. Our investigation employs a web-based experiment where native Russian respondents take part in free-response and multiple-choice translation tasks. Based on the previous studies in mutual intelligibility and non-compositionality, we propose two predictive factors for reading comprehension of unknown but closely related languages: 1) linguistic distances, which include orthographic and phonological distances; 2) surprisal scores obtained from monolingual Language Models (LMs). Our primary objective is to explore the relationship of these two factors with the intelligibility scores and response times of our web-based experiment. Our findings reveal that, while intelligibility scores from the experimental tasks exhibit a stronger correlation with phonological distances, LM surprisal scores appear to be better predictors of the time participants invest in completing the translation tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.cogalex-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni, Yu-Yin Hsu, Simon de Deyne
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
86–97
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Iuliia Zaitova, Irina Stenger, Muhammad Umer Butt, and Tania Avgustinova. 2024. Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 86–97, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages (Zaitova et al., CogALex 2024)
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