In pursuit of brevity?

The value of brevity.

Context, Compositionality, and Brevity

Because of “arguments from the infinity of language”, compositionality is often seen as a ‘non-negotiable’ feature of any theory of the semantics of natural language. But there are a number of features of “ordinary language discourse” that make it seem that compositionality is not true of natural language semantics. Some of these features are lumped together under the rubric of ‘context’, and i...

Measuring Brevity and Violence: A Comparison of Approaches

Brevity is not always a virtue in primate communication.

Semple et al. (Semple et al. in press, Biol. Lett. (doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.1062)) argued that the 'law of brevity' (an inverse relationship between word length and frequency of use) applies not only to human language but also to vocal signalling in non-human primates, because coding efficiency is paramount in both situations. We analysed the frequency of use of signals of different duration in t...

The Clarity-Brevity Trade-off in Generating Referring Expressions

Existing algorithms for the Generation of Referring Expressions (GRE) aim at generating descriptions that allow a hearer to identify its intended referent uniquely; the length of the expression is also considered, usually as a secondary issue. We explore the possibility of making the trade-off between these two factors more explicit, via a general cost function which scores these two aspects se...