Technology & AIJul 23, 2026
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.
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…
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