Vivek Verma


2023

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Revisiting Entropy Rate Constancy in Text
Vivek Verma | Nicholas Tomlin | Dan Klein
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis states that humans tend to distribute information roughly evenly across an utterance or discourse. Early evidence in support of the UID hypothesis came from Genzel and Charniak (2002), which proposed an entropy rate constancy principle based on the probability of English text under n-gram language models. We re-evaluate the claims of Genzel and Charniak (2002) with neural language models, failing to find clear evidence in support of entropy rate constancy. We conduct a range of experiments across datasets, model sizes, and languages and discuss implications for the uniform information density hypothesis and linguistic theories of efficient communication more broadly.