A Database for Measuring Linguistic Information Content.
Abstract
Which languages convey the most information in a given amount of
space? This is a question often asked of linguists, especially by engineers
who often have some information theoretic measure of ``information'' in
mind, but rarely define exactly how they would measure that information. The
question is, in fact remarkably hard to answer, and many linguists consider it
unanswerable. But it is a question that seems as if it ought to have an answer.
If one had a database of close translations between a set of typologically
diverse languages, with detailed marking of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic
features, one could hope to quantify the differences between how these
different languages convey information. Since no appropriate database exists
we decided to construct one. The purpose of this paper is to present our
work on the database, along with some preliminary results. We plan to
release the dataset once complete.
space? This is a question often asked of linguists, especially by engineers
who often have some information theoretic measure of ``information'' in
mind, but rarely define exactly how they would measure that information. The
question is, in fact remarkably hard to answer, and many linguists consider it
unanswerable. But it is a question that seems as if it ought to have an answer.
If one had a database of close translations between a set of typologically
diverse languages, with detailed marking of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic
features, one could hope to quantify the differences between how these
different languages convey information. Since no appropriate database exists
we decided to construct one. The purpose of this paper is to present our
work on the database, along with some preliminary results. We plan to
release the dataset once complete.
Research Areas
