Is Information Density Uniform when Utterances are Grounded on Perception and Discourse?

Previous work examining the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis has shown that while information as measured by surprisal metrics is distributed more or less evenly across documents overall, local discrepancies can arise due to functional pressures corresponding to syntactic and discourse structural constraints. However, work thus far has largely disregarded the relative salience of discourse participants. We fill this gap by studying how overall salience of entities in discourse relates to surprisal using 70K manually annotated mentions across 16 genres of English and a novel minimal-pair prompting method. Our results show that globally salient entities exhibit significantly higher surprisal than non-salient ones, even controlling for position, length, and nesting confounds. Moreover, salient entities systematically reduce surprisal for surrounding content when used as prompts, enhancing document-level predictability. This effect varies by genre, appearing strongest in topic-coherent texts and weakest in conversational contexts. Our findings refine the UID competing pressures framework by identifying global entity salience as a mechanism shaping information distribution in discourse.

To enable large language models to generate outputs that align with human preferences, optimization algorithms based on the comparison between chosen and rejected output pairs have been developed and been proven effective. Some recent endeavors have utilized certain linguistically-derived assumptions about the preference pairs to guide the design of more precise optimization directions. However, human preferences are complex and hard to measure by simplistic criteria, and it is important to incorporate broader and more sophisticated insights about preferred vs. not-preferred language. In this study, we adopt a well-established psycholinguistic theory, Uniform Information Density, to develop a novel preference optimization algorithm, UIDPO. The basic assumption is that humans prefer to produce language in which information is uniformly distributed, because uniformity induces less cognitive processing effort. To implement this idea into the algorithm, we derive a compound metric for information uniformity by combining the global standard deviation and the local second-order difference, and integrate it to the objective of preference optimization. We compare UIDPO with SimPO, a previous state-of-the-art method, obtaining comparable and sometimes better performance on AlpacaEval2, ArenaHard, and MT-Bench. Additional linguistic analysis on complement clauses also shows that UIDPO can better reflect the tendencies of keeping information uniform in natural language than baselines. Our results show that the subtle human preference over the information rate in language is a helpful source for achieving better human alignment for LLMs. The code repository is published here: https://github.com/CLCS-SUSTech/UIDPO.

Although language is predominantly spoken, empirical tests of surprisal theory rely almost entirely on written text. In practice, surprisal is estimated using language models (LMs) trained on text and applied to transcriptions, creating a text bottleneck that limits evaluation of the theory in the spoken modality. We remove this bottleneck by estimating surprisal directly from the speech signal using a speech LM. This raises a key question: should surprisal be defined over realization-specific acoustic inputs or over abstract linguistic units? Since a single unit can have many distinct acoustic realizations, each assigned a different probability by the model, defining surprisal over abstract units is difficult. To address this, we introduce an importance sampling estimator that approximates the probability of an abstract unit by marginalizing over realizations generated by a text-to-speech model. Using pupillometry data from a listening study, we evaluate surprisal theory in this text-free setting at multiple levels of granularity. Obtaining surprisal from several speech LMs, we consistently find that surprisal estimated via importance sampling better predicts pupil dilation than realization-specific surprisal for words. We also find that surprisal values for sub-lexical units are predictive of pupil dilation. While we find that surprisal can be estimated without recourse to text, and that marginalizing over distinct realizations of words is more predictive of lexical processing effort, surprisal as a whole is not a strong predictor of change in pupil size, regardless of its source.