Script Knowledge Constrains Ellipses in Fragments - Evidence from Production Data and Language Modeling
- Robin Lemke (Saarland University)
- Lisa Schäfer (Saarland University)
- Heiner Drenhaus (Saarland University)
- Ingo Reich (Saarland University)
Abstract
We investigate the effect of script-based (Schank and Abelson 1977) extralinguistic context on the omission of words in fragments. Our data elicited with a production task show that predictable words are more often omitted than unpredictable ones, as predicted by the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). We take into account effects of linguistic and extralinguistic context on predictability and propose a method for estimating the surprisal of words in presence of ellipsis. Our study extends previous evidence for UID in two ways: First, we show that not only local linguistic context, but also extralinguistic context determines the likelihood of omissions. Second, we find UID effects on the omission of content words.
Keywords: information theory, fragments, ellipsis, script knowledge, corpus, language modeling
How to Cite:
Lemke, R., Schäfer, L., Drenhaus, H. & Reich, I., (2020) “Script Knowledge Constrains Ellipses in Fragments - Evidence from Production Data and Language Modeling”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 3(1), 441-444. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/mpby-zr74
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