Related papers: The influence of Chunking on Dependency Crossing a…
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 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…
Liu et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive account of research on dependency distance in human languages. While the article is a very rich and useful report on this complex subject, here I will expand on a few specific issues where research…
Here tree dependency structures are studied from three different perspectives: their degree variance (hubiness), the mean dependency length and the number of dependency crossings. Bounds that reveal pairwise dependencies among these three…
Mixing dependency lengths from sequences of different length is a common practice in language research. However, the empirical distribution of dependency lengths of sentences of the same length differs from that of sentences of varying…
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…
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…
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.…
Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a word order principle favouring the placement of syntactically related words close to each other in sentences. Massive evidence of the principle has been reported for more than a decade with the…
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…
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…
Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a well-established principle of word order. It has been predicted theoretically that DDm implies compression, namely the minimization of word lengths. This is a second order prediction because it…
Sequence-processing neural networks led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks. As a consequence, there has been increasing interest in understanding to what extent they process language as humans do. We aim here to uncover which biases…
This paper studies the effect of linguistic constraints on the large scale organization of language. It describes the properties of linguistic networks built using texts of written language with the words randomized. These properties are…
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.…
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), predicting linguistic structures, such as parsing and chunking, has mostly relied on manual annotations of syntactic structures. This paper introduces an unsupervised approach to chunking, a syntactic…
To explore the relationship between dependency distance (DD) and hierarchical distance (HD) in Japanese, we compared the probability distributions of DD and HD with and without sentence length fixed, and analyzed the changes in mean…
The quantum internet aims to interconnect distant devices and enable large-scale computation through distributed quantum algorithms. One of the key obstacles is communication latency during computation. Even separations of a few hundred…
Reasoning tasks are crucial in many domains, especially in science and engineering. Although large language models (LLMs) have made progress in reasoning tasks using techniques such as chain-of-thought and least-to-most prompting, these…
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…