Tsipidi, Eleftheria;
Kiegeland, Samuel;
Nowak, Franz;
Xu, Tianyang;
Wilcox, Ethan;
Warstadt, Alex;
Cotterell, Ryan;
(2025)
The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours.
In:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
(pp. pp. 31636-31659).
Association for Computational Linguistics: Vienna, Austria.
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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.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours |
| Event: | Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) |
| Dates: | Jul 2025 - Jul 2025 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1527 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1527 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | ACL materials are Copyright © 1963–2025 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216474 |
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