Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Correct camera-ready abstract (#3313)
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
m-hahn authored May 22, 2024
1 parent 0d14cbd commit a4d5d95
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 1 deletion.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion data/xml/2024.sigtyp.xml
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
<author><first>Weijie</first><last>Xu</last></author>
<author><first>Richard</first><last>Futrell</last><affiliation>University of California, Irvine</affiliation></author>
<pages>1-9</pages>
<abstract>Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by examining dependency corpora of six languages (Danish, English, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish), with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses.</abstract>
<abstract>Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires the engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by analyzing dependency corpora of 11 languages, with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses. A closer look into the dependencies with core arguments shows that this correlation consistently holds for subject relations but not for object relations.</abstract>
<url hash="74e339b6">2024.sigtyp-1.1</url>
<bibkey>xu-futrell-2024-syntactic</bibkey>
</paper>
Expand Down

0 comments on commit a4d5d95

Please sign in to comment.