Related papers: Does Dependency Locality Predict Non-canonical Wor…
The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which…
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…
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…
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…
We investigate the problem of parsing conversational data of morphologically-rich languages such as Hindi where argument scrambling occurs frequently. We evaluate a state-of-the-art non-linear transition-based parsing system on a new…
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…
We explore the factors influencing the dependence of single sentences on their larger textual context in order to automatically identify candidate sentences for language learning exercises from corpora which are presentable in isolation. An…
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…
High-quality speech generation for low-resource languages, such as many Indian languages, remains a significant challenge due to limited data and diverse linguistic structures. Duration prediction is a critical component in many speech…
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…
Contextual predictability shapes how we choose and encode words in production. The effects of a word's predictability given preceding or past context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of…
Data-driven approaches for dependency parsing have been of great interest in Natural Language Processing for the past couple of decades. However, Sanskrit still lacks a robust purely data-driven dependency parser, probably with an exception…
We show how to predict the basic word-order facts of a novel language given only a corpus of part-of-speech (POS) sequences. We predict how often direct objects follow their verbs, how often adjectives follow their nouns, and in general the…
How do typological properties such as word order and morphological case marking affect the ability of neural sequence models to acquire the syntax of a language? Cross-linguistic comparisons of RNNs' syntactic performance (e.g., on…
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…
Distance minimization is a general principle of language. A special case of this principle in the domain of word order is swap distance minimization. This principle predicts that variations from a canonical order that are reached by fewer…
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…
Recent neural supervised topic segmentation models achieve distinguished superior effectiveness over unsupervised methods, with the availability of large-scale training corpora sampled from Wikipedia. These models may, however, suffer from…
Speakers often face choices as to how to structure their intended message into an utterance. Here we investigate the influence of contextual predictability on the encoding of linguistic content manifested by speaker choice in a classifier…
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…