{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/meaning-to-form-measuring-systematicity-as","title":"Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information","arxiv_id":"1906.05906","date":"2019-06-13","proceeding":"ACL 2019 7","authors":["Tiago Pimentel","Arya D. McCarthy","Damián E. Blasi","Brian Roark","Ryan Cotterell"],"abstract":"A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade? For instance, does the character bigram \\textit{gl} have any systematic relationship to the meaning of words like \\textit{glisten}, \\textit{gleam} and \\textit{glow}? In this work, we offer a holistic quantification of the systematicity of the sign using mutual information and recurrent neural networks. We employ these in a data-driven and massively multilingual approach to the question, examining 106 languages. We find a statistically significant reduction in entropy when modeling a word form conditioned on its semantic representation. Encouragingly, we also recover well-attested English examples of systematic affixes. We conclude with the meta-point: Our approximate effect size (measured in bits) is quite small---despite some amount of systematicity between form and meaning, an arbitrary relationship and its resulting benefits dominate human language.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05906v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05906v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"meaning-to-form-measuring-systematicity-as","repo_url":"https://github.com/tpimentelms/meaning2form","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"form","task_name":"Form"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.05906","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}