Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The syntactic structure of a sentence can be modeled as a tree where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. It is well known that those edges normally do not cross when drawn over the sentence. Here a new null hypothesis for the number of edge crossings of a sentence is presented. That null hypothesis takes into account the length of the pair of edges that may cross and predicts the relative number of crossings in random trees with a small error, suggesting that a ban of crossings or a principle of minimization of crossings are not needed in general to explain the origins of non-crossing dependencies. Our work paves the way for more powerful null hypotheses to investigate the origins of non-crossing dependencies in Nature.
Source: Europhysics Letters (EPL)
Author: R. Ferrer-i-Cancho
Institution: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Award: G5876761098
OpenAlex ID: W2051490167