Extended Abstract
Authors: Robin Lemke (Saarland University) , Lisa Schäfer (Saarland University) , Heiner Drenhaus (Saarland University) , Ingo Reich (Saarland University)
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). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/mpby-zr74