Related papers: The optimality of syntactic dependency distances
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Dependency length minimization is a universally observed quantitative property of natural languages. However, the extent of dependency length minimization, and the cognitive mechanisms through which the language processor achieves this…
The representation of sentences is a very important task. It can be used as a way to exchange data inter-applications. One main characteristic, that a notation must have, is a minimal size and a representative form. This can reduce the…
Sentence ordering aims at arranging a list of sentences in the correct order. Based on the observation that sentence order at different distances may rely on different types of information, we devise a new approach based on multi-granular…
Comment on "Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural language" by Haitao Liu et al
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…
The field of cross-lingual sentence embeddings has recently experienced significant advancements, but research concerning low-resource languages has lagged due to the scarcity of parallel corpora. This paper shows that cross-lingual word…
This paper proposes decoupling the dependency tree from word order, such that surface ordering is not determined by traversing the dependency tree. We develop the notion of a \emph{word order domain structure}, which is linked but…
Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Smart word substitution aims to enhance sentence quality by improving word choices; however current benchmarks rely on human-labeled data. Since word choices are inherently subjective, ground-truth word substitutions generated by a small…
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.…
Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
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…
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…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…