@inproceedings{tsipidi-etal-2025-harmonic,
title = "The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours",
author = "Tsipidi, Eleftheria and
Kiegeland, Samuel and
Nowak, Franz and
Xu, Tianyang and
Wilcox, Ethan and
Warstadt, Alex and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Giulianelli, Mario",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1527/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1527",
pages = "31636--31659",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain a strictly uniform information rate; instead, it fluctuates around a global average. These fluctuations are often explained by factors such as syntactic constraints, stylistic choices, or audience design. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: that these fluctuations may be influenced by an implicit linguistic pressure towards periodicity, where the information rate oscillates at regular intervals, potentially across multiple frequencies simultaneously. We apply harmonic regression and introduce a novel extension called time scaling to detect and test for such periodicity in information contours. Analyzing texts in English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Basque, and Brazilian Portuguese, we find consistent evidence of periodic patterns in information rate. Many dominant frequencies align with discourse structure, suggesting these oscillations reflect meaningful linguistic organization. Beyond highlighting the connection between information rate and discourse structure, our approach offers a general framework for uncovering structural pressures at various levels of linguistic granularity."
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<abstract>The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain a strictly uniform information rate; instead, it fluctuates around a global average. These fluctuations are often explained by factors such as syntactic constraints, stylistic choices, or audience design. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: that these fluctuations may be influenced by an implicit linguistic pressure towards periodicity, where the information rate oscillates at regular intervals, potentially across multiple frequencies simultaneously. We apply harmonic regression and introduce a novel extension called time scaling to detect and test for such periodicity in information contours. Analyzing texts in English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Basque, and Brazilian Portuguese, we find consistent evidence of periodic patterns in information rate. Many dominant frequencies align with discourse structure, suggesting these oscillations reflect meaningful linguistic organization. Beyond highlighting the connection between information rate and discourse structure, our approach offers a general framework for uncovering structural pressures at various levels of linguistic granularity.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours
%A Tsipidi, Eleftheria
%A Kiegeland, Samuel
%A Nowak, Franz
%A Xu, Tianyang
%A Wilcox, Ethan
%A Warstadt, Alex
%A Cotterell, Ryan
%A Giulianelli, Mario
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F tsipidi-etal-2025-harmonic
%X The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain a strictly uniform information rate; instead, it fluctuates around a global average. These fluctuations are often explained by factors such as syntactic constraints, stylistic choices, or audience design. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: that these fluctuations may be influenced by an implicit linguistic pressure towards periodicity, where the information rate oscillates at regular intervals, potentially across multiple frequencies simultaneously. We apply harmonic regression and introduce a novel extension called time scaling to detect and test for such periodicity in information contours. Analyzing texts in English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Basque, and Brazilian Portuguese, we find consistent evidence of periodic patterns in information rate. Many dominant frequencies align with discourse structure, suggesting these oscillations reflect meaningful linguistic organization. Beyond highlighting the connection between information rate and discourse structure, our approach offers a general framework for uncovering structural pressures at various levels of linguistic granularity.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1527
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1527/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1527
%P 31636-31659
Markdown (Informal)
[The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1527/) (Tsipidi et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Eleftheria Tsipidi, Samuel Kiegeland, Franz Nowak, Tianyang Xu, Ethan Wilcox, Alex Warstadt, Ryan Cotterell, and Mario Giulianelli. 2025. The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31636–31659, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.