Tania Avgustinova

Syntactic description of free word order languages

A framework for the description of syntactic structures of free word order languages is proposed, based on combination of intuitions underlying immediate constitutent description, dependency description and communicative dynamism. The combined approach is compared to its sources and shown superior in descriptive power, esp. in the area of free intermixing of (any number of) adjuncts with complements and in coordination. Close resemblance to two other recent approaches is pointed out.

Language models, surprisal and fantasy in Slavic intercomprehension

Abstract In monolingual human language processing, the predictability of a word given its surrounding sentential context is crucial. With regard to receptive multilingualism, it is unclear to what extent predictability in context interplays with other linguistic factors in understanding a related but unknown language – a process called intercomprehension. We distinguish two dimensions influencing processing effort during intercomprehension: surprisal in sentential context and linguistic distance. Based on this hypothesis, we formulate expectations regarding the difficulty of designed experimental stimuli and compare them to the results from think-aloud protocols of experiments in which Czech native speakers decode Polish sentences by agreeing on an appropriate translation. On the one hand, orthographic and lexical distances are reliable predictors of linguistic similarity. On the other hand, we obtain the predictability of words in a sentence with the help of trigram language models. We find that linguistic distance (encoding similarity) and in-context surprisal (predictability in context) appear to be complementary, with neither factor outweighing the other, and that our distinguishing of these two measurable dimensions is helpful in understanding certain unexpected effects in human behaviour.

Modeling the impact of orthographic coding on Czech–Polish and Bulgarian–Russian reading intercomprehension

Focusing on orthography as a primary linguistic interface in every reading activity, the central research question we address here is how orthographic intelligibility can be measured and predicted between closely related languages. This paper presents methods and findings of modeling orthographic intelligibility in a reading intercomprehension scenario from the information-theoretic perspective. The focus of the study is on two Slavic language pairs: Czech–Polish (West Slavic, using the Latin script) and Bulgarian–Russian (South Slavic and East Slavic, respectively, using the Cyrillic script). In this article, we present computational methods for measuring orthographic distance and orthographic asymmetry by means of the Levenshtein algorithm, conditional entropy and adaptation surprisal method that are expected to predict the influence of orthography on mutual intelligibility in reading.