Abstract
In this replication study of previous research into dependency length minimisation (DLM), we pilot a new parallel multilingual parsed corpus to examine whether previous findings are upheld when controlling for variation in domain and sentence content between languages. We follow the approach of previous research in comparing the dependency lengths of observed sentences in a multilingual corpus to a variety of baselines: permutations of the sentences, either random or according to some fixed schema. We go on to compare DLM with intervener complexity measure (ICM), an alternative measure of syntactic complexity. Our findings uphold both dependency length and intervener complexity minimisation in all languages under investigation. We also find a markedly lesser extent of dependency length minimisation in verb-final languages, and the same for intervener complexity measure. We conclude that dependency length and intervener complexity minimisation as universals are upheld when controlling for domain and content variation, but that further research is needed into the asymmetry between verb-final and other languages in this regard.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigtyp-1.11
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Lisa Beinborn, Koustava Goswami, Saliha Muradoğlu, Alexey Sorokin, Ritesh Kumar, Andreas Shcherbakov, Edoardo M. Ponti, Ryan Cotterell, Ekaterina Vylomova
- Venue:
- SIGTYP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 110–119
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigtyp-1.11
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigtyp-1.11
- Cite (ACL):
- Andrew Thomas Dyer. 2023. Revisiting Dependency Length and Intervener Complexity Minimisation on a Parallel Corpus in 35 Languages. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 110–119, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Revisiting Dependency Length and Intervener Complexity Minimisation on a Parallel Corpus in 35 Languages (Dyer, SIGTYP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.sigtyp-1.11.pdf