Title
Predicting cross-linguistic adjective order with information gain.
Abstract
Languages vary in their placement of multiple adjectives before, after, or surrounding the noun, but they typically exhibit strong intra-language tendencies on the relative order of those adjectives (e.g., the preference for `big blue box' in English, `grande bo\^{i}te bleue' in French, and `alsund\={u}q al'azraq alkab\={\i}r' in Arabic). We advance a new quantitative account of adjective order across typologically-distinct languages based on maximizing information gain. Our model addresses the left-right asymmetry of French-type ANA sequences with the same approach as AAN and NAA orderings, without appeal to other mechanisms. We find that, across 32 languages, the preferred order of adjectives largely mirrors an efficient algorithm of maximizing information gain.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
ACL/IJCNLP
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
2021.findings-acl
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
William Dyer100.34
richard futrell21511.08
Zoey Liu301.69
Gregory Scontras400.34