Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines
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
- Editors:
- Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
- 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/teach-a-man-to-fish/E17-2021.pdf