• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.11
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• pp.41-49
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• 2019

We are to build an unsupervised machine learning-based language model which can estimate the amount of information that are in need to process words consisting of subword-level morphemes and syllables. We are then to investigate whether the reading times of words reflecting their morphemic and syllabic structures are predicted by an information-theoretic measure such as surprisal. Specifically, the proposed Morfessor-based unsupervised machine learning model is first to be trained on the large dataset of sentences on Sejong Corpus and is then to be applied to estimate the information-theoretic measure on each word in the test data of Korean words. The reading times of the words in the test data are to be recruited from Korean Lexicon Project (KLP) Database. A comparison between the information-theoretic measures of the words in point and the corresponding reading times by using a linear mixed effect model reveals a reliable correlation between surprisal and reading time. We conclude that surprisal is positively related to the processing effort (i.e. reading time), confirming the surprisal hypothesis.