Title: An Informative Exploration of the Lexicon

Abstract:

During my PhD I've been exploring the lexicon through the lens of information theory. In this talk, I'll give an overview on results detailing the distribution of information in words (are initial or final positions more informative?), and cross-linguistic compensations (if a language has more information per character, are their words shorter?). I'll also present two new information-theoretic operationalisations (of systematicity and lexical ambiguity) which allow us to analyse computational linguistics question through corpus analyses -- relying only on natural (unsupervised) data.