Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
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 independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practicall...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/100375 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/100375 https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21810 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Computational linguistics Computational complexity Human language Dependency length Syntactic dependencies Projectivity Lingüística computacional Complexitat computacional Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Llenguatge natural |
| Sumario: | 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 independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, that is, sentences with shorter dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language. |
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