Dependency Distance as a Metric of Language Comprehension Difficulty
By Haitao Liu. 2008
407 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Linguistic complexity is a measure of the cognitive difficulty of human language processing. The present paper proposes dependency distance, in the framework of dependency grammar, as an insightful metric of complexity. Three hypotheses are formulated: (1) The human language parser prefers linear orders that minimize the average dependency distance of the recognized sentence (2) There is a threshold that the average dependency distance of most sentences or texts of human languages does not exceed (3) Grammar and cognition combine to keep dependency distance within the threshold. Twenty corpora from different languages with dependency syntactic annotation are used to test these hypotheses. The paper reports the average dependency distance in these corpora and analyzes the factors which influence dependency distance. The findings-that average dependency distance has a tendency to be minimized in human language and that there is a threshold of less than 3 words in average dependency distance and grammar plays an important role in constraining distance-support all three hypotheses, although some questions are still open for further research.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6b9cf00698a76d7a1e5ba58baa92d8799366813
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In Artificial Intelligence
Citations in the corpus
- Investigating locality effects and surprisal in written English syntactic choice phenomena. (2016, unknown): “Futrell, Mahowald, and Gibson (2015) extend these results by conducting a large-scale study of dependency length minimization involving 37 languages (see also Ferrer i Cancho 2004, Gulordava & Merlo 2015, Liu 2008).”
- The effects of sentence length on dependency distance, dependency direction and the implications–Based on a parallel English–Chinese dependency treebank (2015, background): “…a random language, which does not follow syntactic rules, will be more readily influenced by sentence length, but the grammar and cognitive mechanisms will cause the dependency distance of natural languages to become as short as possible (minimization) (Liu, 2007, 2008; Gildea and Temperley, 2010).”