The relation between dependency distance and frequency

Xinying Chen (1, 2) , Kim Gerdes (3, 4)

1 Ostravská univerzita / University of Ostrava
2 Xjtu - Xi'an Jiaotong University
3 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
4 ALMAnaCH - Automatic Language Modelling and ANAlysis & Computational Humanities

This present pilot study investigates the relationship between dependency distance and frequency based on the analysis of an English dependency treebank. The preliminary result shows that there is a non-linear relation between dependency distance and frequency. This relation between them can be further formalized as a power law function which can be used to predict the distribution of dependency distance in a treebank.

Domaines: Linguistique; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Xinying Chen, Kim Gerdes. The relation between dependency distance and frequency. Quasy 2019, Quantitative Syntax 2019, Syntaxfest, Aug 2019, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02270528⟩