Related papers: The risks of mixing dependency lengths from sequen…
The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an…
The structure of a sentence can be represented as a network where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. Interestingly, crossing syntactic dependencies have been observed to be infrequent in human languages. This…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be modeled as a tree where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. It is well-known that those edges normally do not cross when drawn over the sentence. Here a…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be modelled as a tree, where vertices correspond to words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. It has been claimed recurrently that the number of edge crossings in real sentences is small.…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph, where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two linked words is defined as the difference…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
The use of null hypotheses (in a statistical sense) is common in hard sciences but not in theoretical linguistics. Here the null hypothesis that the low frequency of syntactic dependency crossings is expected by an arbitrary ordering of…
Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
It has been hypothesized that the rather small number of crossings in real syntactic dependency trees is a side-effect of pressure for dependency length minimization. Here we answer a related important research question: what would be the…
This paper hypothesizes that chunking plays important role in reducing dependency distance and dependency crossings. Computer simulations, when compared with natural languages,show that chunking reduces mean dependency distance (MDD) of a…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
In this paper we build on earlier observations and theory regarding word length frequency and sequential distribution to develop a mathematical characterization of some of the language features distinguishing isometrically lineated text…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
In the recent issue of PNAS, Futrell et al. claims that their study of 37 languages gives the first large scale cross-language evidence for Dependency Length Minimization, which is an overstatement that ignores similar previous researches.…
Are pairs of words that tend to occur together also likely to stand in a linguistic dependency? This empirical question is motivated by a long history of literature in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and NLP. In this work we…
Dependency trees have proven to be a very successful model to represent the syntactic structure of sentences of human languages. In these structures, vertices are words and edges connect syntactically-dependent words. The tendency of these…
This study re-evaluates the assumption that long-range correlations in sentence length are a fundamental feature of natural language and a marker of literary style. While previous research has suggested that punctuation marks--particularly…
The syntactic structure of a sentence is often represented using syntactic dependency trees. The sum of the distances between syntactically related words has been in the limelight for the past decades. Research on dependency distances led…
This study investigates human and ChatGPT text simplification and its relationship to dependency distance. A set of 220 sentences, with increasing grammatical difficulty as measured in a prior user study, were simplified by a human expert…