arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 1608.03587cs.CL
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词序和词结构之间的统计权衡--最小努力原则的大规模证据

The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure - large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort

Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany(德语语言研究所(IDS),曼海姆,德国)

Alexander Koplenig, Peter Meyer, Sascha Wolfer, Carolin Mueller-Spitzer

摘要:

语言使用不同的策略来传递结构和语法信息。例如,虽然句子中的语法依赖关系主要通过汉语普通话或越南语等语言的单词排序来传达,但对于因纽特语或克丘亚语等语言,单词排序的限制要少得多,因为这些语言(也)使用单词的内部结构(例如屈折形态)来标记句子中的语法关系。基于对1,500多个独特的翻译圣经不同的书籍在1,100多个不同的语言,作为母语约60亿人的定量分析(超过世界人口的80%),我们提供了大量的统计贸易证据-单词排序所传达的信息量和单词内部结构所传达的信息量之间的差异:更强烈地依赖于词序信息的语言倾向于更少地依赖于词结构信息,反之亦然。此外,我们发现,尽管信息表达方式存在差异,但也有证据表明圣经正典的不同书籍之间存在权衡,这种权衡在不同语言之间几乎没有变化:书的词序信息量越多,其文字结构的信息量就越少,反之亦然。我们认为,这可能表明,一方面,语言编码信息的方式非常不同(但有效)。另一方面,与内容相关的特征和风格特征以非常相似的方式进行统计编码。

英文摘要:

Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as those languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in more than 1,100 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. In addition, we find that - despite differences in the way information is expressed - there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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