@inproceedings{chuprinko-etal-2025-distance,
    title = "Distance and Projectivity as Predictors of Sentence Acceptability in Free Word Order Languages",
    author = "Chuprinko, Kirill  and
      Novozhilov, Artem  and
      Stepanov, Arthur",
    editor = "Haji{\v{c}}ov{\'a}, Eva  and
      Kahane, Sylvain",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.depling-1.11/",
    pages = "108--119",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-290-9",
    abstract = "This study investigates how two core metrics rooted in Dependency Grammar, Minimal Dependency Distance (MDD) and projectivity, predict sentence acceptability in Russian and Serbo-Croatian. Using exhaustive word order permutations in controlled five-word sentences, we model how these metrics relate to acceptability judgments in two psycholinguistic experiments. While MDD has been widely studied as a processing constraint, projectivity violations have received less attention in acceptability modeling. We show that both significantly affect judgments, with projectivity playing a surprisingly strong role. In addition, Serbo-Croatian{'}s rigid clitic placement provides a natural test case for disentangling grammatical from processing constraints. Our findings offer a computationally precise, dependency-based model of acceptability that advances cognitively grounded language modeling for free word order languages."
}