Related papers: A bounded rationality account of dependency length…
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…
Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with Object-before-Subject (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with Subject-before-Object (SOV) order. Although this difficulty…
We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order…
The word order of a sentence is shaped by multiple principles. The principle of syntactic dependency distance minimization is in conflict with the principle of surprisal minimization (or predictability maximization) in single head syntactic…
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…
Word order choices during sentence production can be primed by preceding sentences. In this work, we test the DUAL MECHANISM hypothesis that priming is driven by multiple different sources. Using a Hindi corpus of text productions, we model…
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…
Indian languages are inflectional and agglutinative and typically follow clause-free word order. The structure of sentences across most major Indian languages are similar when their dependency parse trees are considered. While some…
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…
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…
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…
We address the linguistic problem of the sequential arrangement of a head and its dependents from an information theoretic perspective. In particular, we consider the optimal placement of a head that maximizes the predictability of the…
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a tree where edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. When that structure is a star, it has been demonstrated that the head should be placed in the middle of the linear…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Text to speech (TTS) are two prominent area of research in human computer interaction nowadays. A set of phonetically rich sentences is in a matter of importance in order to develop these two…
It is well known that the length of a syntactic dependency determines its online memory cost. Thus, the problem of the placement of a head and its dependents (complements or modifiers) that minimizes online memory is equivalent to the…
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 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 minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a…
We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015). First, we acknowledge error in…