Abstract
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This paper investigates the impact of UID principles on syntactic reduction, specifically focusing on the optional omission of the connector “that” in English subordinate clauses. Building upon previous research, we extend our investigation to a larger corpus of written English, utilize contemporary large language models (LLMs) and extend the information-uniformity principles by the notion of entropy, to estimate the UID manifestations in the usecase of syntactic reduction choices.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-short.36
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 378–385
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.36
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ella Rabinovich. 2024. That’s Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of “that” Omission in English Subordinate Clauses. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 378–385, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- That’s Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of “that” Omission in English Subordinate Clauses (Rabinovich, ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-short.36.pdf