@InProceedings{lemke-horch-reich:2017:EACLshort,
  author    = {Lemke, Robin  and  Horch, Eva  and  Reich, Ingo},
  title     = {Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers},
  month     = {April},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Valencia, Spain},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {131--135},
  abstract  = {In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the distribution of article
	omission specifically is constrained by principles of Information Theory
	(Shannon 1948). In particular, Information Theory predicts a stronger
	preference for article omission before nouns which are relatively unpredictable
	in context of the
	preceding words. We investigated article omission in German newspaper headlines
	with a corpus and acceptability rating study. Both support our hypothesis:
	Articles are inserted more often before unpredictable nouns and subjects
	perceive
	article omission before predictable nouns as more well-formed than before
	unpredictable ones. This suggests that information theoretic principles
	constrain the distribution of article omission in headlines.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E17-2021}
}