Random crossings in dependency trees

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 expected number of crossings if the natural order of a senten...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Ferrer Cancho, Ramon|||0000-0002-7820-923X
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
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:2117/106079
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/106079
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Computational linguistics
Syntactic dependency trees
Syntax
Distance
Crossings
Planarity
Lingüística computacional
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Llenguatge natural
Descripción
Sumario: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 expected number of crossings if the natural order of a sentence was lost and replaced by a random ordering? We show that this number depends only on the number of vertices of the dependency tree (the sentence length) and the second moment about zero of vertex degrees. The expected number of crossings is minimum for a star tree (crossings are impossible) and maximum for a linear tree (the number of crossings is of the order of the square of the sequence length).