@inproceedings{Kermes2017, title = {Average surprisal of parts-of-speech}, author = {Hannah Kermes and Elke Teich}, url = {https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/corpus/conference-archives/2017/general/paper207.pdf}, year = {2017}, date = {2017}, publisher = {Corpus Linguistics 2017}, address = {Birmingham, UK}, abstract = {We present an approach to investigate the differences between lexical words and function words and the respective parts-of-speech from an information-theoretical point of view (cf. Shannon, 1949). We use average surprisal (AvS) to measure the amount of information transmitted by a linguistic unit. We expect to find function words to be more predictable (having a lower AvS) and lexical words to be less predictable (having a higher AvS). We also assume that function words' AvS is fairly constant over time and registers, while AvS of lexical words is more variable depending on time and register.}, pubstate = {published}, type = {inproceedings} }