Modeling the Impact of Syntactic Distance and Surprisal on Cross-Slavic Text Comprehension

Irina Stenger, Philip Georgis, Tania Avgustinova, Bernd Möbius, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
We focus on the syntactic variation and measure syntactic distances between nine Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Russian, and Ukrainian) using symmetric measures of insertion, deletion and movement of syntactic units in the parallel sentences of the fable “The North Wind and the Sun”. Additionally, we investigate phonetic and orthographic asymmetries between selected languages by means of the information theoretical notion of surprisal. Syntactic distance and surprisal are, thus, considered as potential predictors of mutual intelligibility between related languages. In spoken and written cloze test experiments for Slavic native speakers, the presented predictors will be validated as to whether variations in syntax lead to a slower or impeded intercomprehension of Slavic texts.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.802
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7368–7376
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.802
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irina Stenger, Philip Georgis, Tania Avgustinova, Bernd Möbius, and Dietrich Klakow. 2022. Modeling the Impact of Syntactic Distance and Surprisal on Cross-Slavic Text Comprehension. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7368–7376, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling the Impact of Syntactic Distance and Surprisal on Cross-Slavic Text Comprehension (Stenger et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.802.pdf