Related papers: Ease of dependency distance minimization in star-l…
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…
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…
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…
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 syntactic structure of a sentence can be described as a tree that indicates the syntactic relationships between words. In spite of significant progress in unsupervised methods that retrieve the syntactic structure of sentences, guessing…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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…
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…
Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention…
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 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 is commonly believed that knowledge of syntactic structure should improve language modeling. However, effectively and computationally efficiently incorporating syntactic structure into neural language models has been a challenging topic.…
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…
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…
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…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…