@inproceedings{LemkeHorchReich:17,
title = {Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke and Eva Horch and Ingo Reich},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E17-2021},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers},
pages = {131-135},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Valencia, Spain},
abstract = {In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the distribution of article omission specifically is constrained by principles of Information Theory (Shannon 1948). In particular, Information Theory predicts a stronger preference for article omission before nouns which are relatively unpredictable in context of the preceding words. We investigated article omission in German newspaper headlines with a corpus and acceptability rating study. Both support our hypothesis: Articles are inserted more often before unpredictable nouns and subjects perceive article omission before predictable nouns as more well-formed than before unpredictable ones. This suggests that information theoretic principles constrain the distribution of article omission in headlines.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}