arXiv Computation and Language
Surprisal Theory is Tautological (without Rational Grounding)
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Surprisal Theory is Tautological (without Rational Grounding)
Surprisal theory holds that the human processing difficulty of a linguistic unit in context is an affine function of its surprisal under some language model. I argue this claim is a tautology without further constraint: for any non-negative difficulty measure over units in context, there exists a language model whose surprisal is an affine function of it under mild technical conditions.
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