ACL 2024short1 citations
That’s Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of “that” Omission in English Subordinate Clauses
Abstract
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This paper investigates the impact of UID principles on syntactic reduction, specifically focusing on the optional omission of the connector “that” in English subordinate clauses. Building upon previous research, we extend our investigation to a larger corpus of written English, utilize contemporary large language models (LLMs) and extend the information-uniformity principles by the notion of entropy, to estimate the UID manifestations in the usecase of syntactic reduction choices.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{rabinovich-2024-thats,
title = "That`s Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of {\textquotedblleft}that{\textquotedblright} Omission in {E}nglish Subordinate Clauses",
author = "Rabinovich, Ella",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.36/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-short.36",
pages = "378--385"
}