@inproceedings{chen-etal-2022-investigating,
title = "Investigating Information-Theoretic Properties of the Typology of Spatial Demonstratives",
author = "Chen, Sihan and
Futrell, Richard and
Mahowald, Kyle",
editor = "Vylomova, Ekaterina and
Ponti, Edoardo and
Cotterell, Ryan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, Washington",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.12",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.12",
pages = "94--95",
abstract = "Using data from Nintemann et al. (2020), we explore the variability in complexity and informativity across spatial demonstrative systems using spatial deictic lexicons from 223 languages. We argue from an information-theoretic perspective (Shannon, 1948) that spatial deictic lexicons are efficient in communication, balancing informativity and complexity. Specifically, we find that under an appropriate choice of cost function and need probability over meanings, among all the 21146 theoretically possible spatial deictic lexicons, those adopted by real languages lie near an efficient frontier. Moreover, we find that the conditions that the need probability and the cost function need to satisfy are consistent with the cognitive science literature regarding the source-goal asymmetry. We also show that the data are better explained by introducing a notion of systematicity, which is not currently accounted for in Information Bottleneck approaches to linguistic efficiency.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="chen-etal-2022-investigating">
<titleInfo>
<title>Investigating Information-Theoretic Properties of the Typology of Spatial Demonstratives</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sihan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Richard</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Futrell</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kyle</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mahowald</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2022-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ekaterina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Vylomova</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Edoardo</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ponti</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ryan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Cotterell</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Seattle, Washington</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Using data from Nintemann et al. (2020), we explore the variability in complexity and informativity across spatial demonstrative systems using spatial deictic lexicons from 223 languages. We argue from an information-theoretic perspective (Shannon, 1948) that spatial deictic lexicons are efficient in communication, balancing informativity and complexity. Specifically, we find that under an appropriate choice of cost function and need probability over meanings, among all the 21146 theoretically possible spatial deictic lexicons, those adopted by real languages lie near an efficient frontier. Moreover, we find that the conditions that the need probability and the cost function need to satisfy are consistent with the cognitive science literature regarding the source-goal asymmetry. We also show that the data are better explained by introducing a notion of systematicity, which is not currently accounted for in Information Bottleneck approaches to linguistic efficiency.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">chen-etal-2022-investigating</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.12</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.12</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2022-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>94</start>
<end>95</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Investigating Information-Theoretic Properties of the Typology of Spatial Demonstratives
%A Chen, Sihan
%A Futrell, Richard
%A Mahowald, Kyle
%Y Vylomova, Ekaterina
%Y Ponti, Edoardo
%Y Cotterell, Ryan
%S Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
%D 2022
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Seattle, Washington
%F chen-etal-2022-investigating
%X Using data from Nintemann et al. (2020), we explore the variability in complexity and informativity across spatial demonstrative systems using spatial deictic lexicons from 223 languages. We argue from an information-theoretic perspective (Shannon, 1948) that spatial deictic lexicons are efficient in communication, balancing informativity and complexity. Specifically, we find that under an appropriate choice of cost function and need probability over meanings, among all the 21146 theoretically possible spatial deictic lexicons, those adopted by real languages lie near an efficient frontier. Moreover, we find that the conditions that the need probability and the cost function need to satisfy are consistent with the cognitive science literature regarding the source-goal asymmetry. We also show that the data are better explained by introducing a notion of systematicity, which is not currently accounted for in Information Bottleneck approaches to linguistic efficiency.
%R 10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.12
%U https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.12
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.12
%P 94-95
Markdown (Informal)
[Investigating Information-Theoretic Properties of the Typology of Spatial Demonstratives](https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.12) (Chen et al., SIGTYP 2022)
ACL