Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information |
| Conférencier | Ryan Cotterell (ETH Zürich) |
| Date | mardi 15 décembre 2020 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | ZOOM (Meeting ID: 963 3076 2510, Passcode: 522522) changement de salle |
| Description |
My talk will focus on a longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade? For instance, does the character bigram ‘gl’ have any systematic relationship to the meaning of words like ‘glisten’, ‘gleam’ and ‘glow’? We offer a holistic quantification of the systematicity of the sign using mutual information and recurrent neural networks. We employ these in a data-driven and massively multilingual approach to the question, examining 106 languages. We find a statistically significant reduction in entropy when modeling a word form conditioned on its semantic representation. Encouragingly, we also recover well-attested English examples of systematic affixes. We conclude with the meta-point: our approximate effect size (measured in bits) is quite small—despite some amount of systematicity between form and meaning, an arbitrary relationship and its resulting benefits dominate human language.
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