While articles are obligatory before singular nouns in many languages,
in newspaper headlines they are frequently omitted. The optionality of
article omission raises the question of why some articles are omitted
and others not? We hypothesize that information-theoretic principles
constrain the distribution of article omission, and specifically that it
is more likely the more predictable the corresponding noun is. We tested
this hypothesis with a rating and a corpus study on German newspaper
headlines. Both confirm our hypothesis: Article omission turns out to be
more likely (corpus study) and more strongly preferred (rating study)
for relatively predictable nouns.