#word-order

Surprisal Typology: 12 Languages Cluster by Family, Not Word Order

Does the surprisal-by-sentence-position profile in an LLM cluster by language family (genealogy) or by syntactic word order (SOV vs SVO)?

• Language family clusters, word order doesn't. Within-family curve distance is 0.0073 vs between-family 0.0110 (1.51x rat…
• Romance languages form the tightest cluster. Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian have nearly overlapping surprisal …