are difficult to comprehend. Topic of the Talk & Preliminary Remarks

● We will be discussing an information theoretic approach to predicting the difficulty of sentence comprehension. ● We will clarify a proposal by Roger Levy that we can predict the difficulty of a sentence by looking at the surprisal of a word in a sentence. ● No background knowledge in lunguistics is required. (I am also no linguist). ● Please feel free to interrupt me at any time. Information Theory & Language ● Already Shannon and Weaver did research on langauge in information theoretic terms. ● Shannon and Weaver wanted to know what the redundancy of the English Language was. ● Redundancy is the fraction of the message which is determined not by free choice but by statistical rules