Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages

Liu, Haitao; Cai, X.; Liang, Junying

doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2017.03.002

Cited by 203 publications

(191 citation statements)

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“…Second, distance provides a "formal background" or a "specific background" (following Bunge's terminology [10]) from physics or mathematics such as the theory of geographical or spatial networks (where the syntactic dependency structures of sentences are particular cases in one dimension) [12,13] or the theory for the distance between like elements in sequences (where the couple of words involved in a syntactic dependency are particular cases of like elements) [14]. Therefore we agree with [1] on the convenience of the term distance.…”

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confidence: 68%

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Towards a theory of word order

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2017

Physics of Life Reviews

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Liu et al's reflections on the term dependency length minimization [1] may look anecdotal but they are not. By the turn of the 20th century, we put forward a "Euclidean distance minimization" hypothesis for the distance between syntactically linked words and various word order phenomena [2,3] 1 . Later on, pressure from language researchers forced us to replace it with terms such as "online memory minimization" [5] because our initial formulation was obscure to them. Recently, researchers from all over the world have been granted to use the term "dependency length minimization" by the popes thanks to whom [6] came into light. Although "length" is a particular case of distance in this context and thus downsizes our original formulation, it is still abstract enough to allow for progress in theoretical research [7] and frees us from the heavy burden of contingency, i.e. the real implementation of the principle (at present believed to result from decay and interference as reviewed by Liu et al) or the current view of the architecture of memory [8,9]. Our position is grounded on the high predictive power of that principle per se [5].However, the lower generality of the term "dependency length" can be anEmail address: rferrericancho@cs.upc.edu (R. Ferrer-i-Cancho) 1 These were pieces of our PhD thesis [4] that were submitted for publication before its defense. Preprint submitted to ElsevierJune 16, 2017 obstacle to the construction of a fully-fledged scientific field [10]. First, distance minimization allows one to unify pressure to reduce dependency lengths (still distances) with constraints on word order variation and change arising from a principle of swap distance minimization [11]. "Distance minimization" has therefore a higher predictive power and greater utility in a general theory of communication. Second, distance provides a "formal background" or a "specific background" (following Bunge's terminology [10]) from physics or mathematics such as the theory of geographical or spatial networks (where the syntactic dependency structures of sentences are particular cases in one dimension) [12,13] or the theory for the distance between like elements in sequences (where the couple of words involved in a syntactic dependency are particular cases of like elements) [14]. Therefore we agree with [1] on the convenience of the term distance.A less flashy contribution of [6] has been promoting the need of controlling for sentence length (as a predictor of dependency length in their mixed-effects regression model) in research on dependency length minimization, an important methodological issue [15] that was addressed early [2] but neglected in subsequent research (e.g., [16,17,18]).Liu et al focus their review on the fundamental principle of dependency length minimization but understanding how it interacts with other principles is vital. In 2009, we put forward another fundamental word order principle, i.e. predictability maximization, and presented a theoretical framework culminating in a conflict between dependency lengt...

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confidence: 99%

Towards a theory of word order

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2017

Physics of Life Reviews

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“…In the context of syntactic dependency networks, the length of an edge is defined as an Euclidean distance, namely, the linear distance between the words that are connected: adjacent words are at distance 1, words separated by one word are at distance 2, and so on [9,11]. In the sentence at the top of Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, the low frequency of crossings may naturally arise, indirectly, from the actual length of dependencies [25], which are constrained by a well-known psychological principle: dependency length minimization (see [11], [51] or [52] for a review). That explanatory principle, which holds even in languages allowing for words to scramble freely [16], could follow from more general constraints on language processing [53].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scarcity of crossing dependencies: A direct outcome of a specific constraint?

Gómez-Rodríguez

Ferrer-i-Cancho

2017

Phys. Rev. E

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The structure of a sentence can be represented as a network where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. Interestingly, crossing syntactic dependencies have been observed to be infrequent in human languages. This leads to the question of whether the scarcity of crossings in languages arises from an independent and specific constraint on crossings. We provide statistical evidence suggesting that this is not the case, as the proportion of dependency crossings of sentences from a wide range of languages can be accurately estimated by a simple predictor based on a null hypothesis on the local probability that two dependencies cross given their lengths. The relative error of this predictor never exceeds 5% on average, whereas the error of a baseline predictor assuming a random ordering of the words of a sentence is at least 6 times greater. Our results suggest that the low frequency of crossings in natural languages is neither originated by hidden knowledge of language nor by the undesirability of crossings per se, but as a mere side effect of the principle of dependency length minimization.

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“…Dependency grammar even holds words as the only key units of sentences, linked together to form syntactic structures of different sizes [10]. As a result, lexical features may not only reflect linguistic properties at the level of words, but also throw light on syntactic patterns at the level of phrases and sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long‐Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years

Chen

Liu

2018

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We investigate how short and long-range word length correlations evolve in Chinese narrative texts. The results show that, for short-range word length correlations, no significant linear evolutionary trend was found. But for long-range correlations, there are two opposite tendencies for two different regimes: the Hurst exponent of small-scale (box size ranges from 10 to 100) word length correlations decreases over time, and the exponent of large-scale (box size ranges from 101 to 1000) shows an increasing tendency. The increase of word length is corroborated as an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese. Further analyses show that a significant correlation coefficient is obtained between Hurst exponents from the small-scale correlations and mean word length across time. These indicate that word length correlation evolution possesses different self-adaptive mechanisms in terms of different scales of distances between words. We speculate that the increase of word length and sentence length in written Chinese may account for this phenomenon, in terms of both the social-cultural aspects and the self-adapting properties of language structures.

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Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages

Cited by 203 publications

References 69 publications

Towards a theory of word order

Towards a theory of word order

Scarcity of crossing dependencies: A direct outcome of a specific constraint?

Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long‐Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years

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