What quantifying word order freedom can tell us about dependency corpora

Maja Buljan


Abstract
Building upon existing work on word order freedom and syntactic annotation, this paper investigates whether we can differentiate between findings that reveal inherent properties of natural languages and their syntax, and features dependent on annotations used in computing the measures. An existing quantifiable and linguistically interpretable measure of word order freedom in language is applied to take a closer look at the robustness of the basic measure (word order entropy) to variations in dependency corpora used in the analysis. Measures are compared at three levels of generality, applied to corpora annotated according to the Universal Dependencies v1 and v2 annotation guidelines, selecting 31 languages for analysis. Preliminary results show that certain measures, such as subject-object relation order freedom, are sensitive to slight changes in annotation guidelines, while simpler measures are more robust, highlighting aspects of these metrics that should be taken into consideration when using dependency corpora for linguistic analysis and generalisation.
Anthology ID:
2023.depling-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)
Month:
March
Year:
2023
Address:
Washington, D.C.
Editors:
Owen Rambow, François Lareau
Venues:
DepLing | SyntaxFest
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
54–67
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.depling-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maja Buljan. 2023. What quantifying word order freedom can tell us about dependency corpora. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023), pages 54–67, Washington, D.C.. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What quantifying word order freedom can tell us about dependency corpora (Buljan, DepLing-SyntaxFest 2023)
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