Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information

Tiago Pimentel, Arya D. McCarthy, Damian Blasi, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell


Abstract
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’? In this work, 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.
Anthology ID:
P19-1171
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1751–1764
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1171
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1171
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tiago Pimentel, Arya D. McCarthy, Damian Blasi, Brian Roark, and Ryan Cotterell. 2019. Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1751–1764, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information (Pimentel et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1171.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1171.mp4
Code
 tpimentelms/meaning2form