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英语与德语的句法语言变迁:度量指标、依存解析器与趋同现象

Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences

University of Aberdeen(阿伯丁大学);University of Mannheim(曼海姆大学);Ghent University(根特大学);Goethe University Frankfurt(法兰克福歌德大学)

Yanran Chen, Wei Zhao, Anne Breitbarth, Manuel Stoeckel, Alexander Mehler, Steffen Eger

AI总结:

本文利用160年议会辩论语料和五个依存解析器,系统分析英语与德语的15项句法度量,发现两语言变迁趋势高度趋同,并警示解析器选择会显著影响句法变迁结论。

摘要:

许多研究表明,人类语言倾向于朝着更低复杂度和更高交际效率的方向优化。句法依存距离衡量依存词之间的线性距离,通常被视为语言加工难度和工作记忆负荷的关键指标。本文利用过去约160年的议会辩论语料库,考察英语和德语在句法语言变迁中的历时趋势。我们的观察基于五个依存解析器,包括广泛使用的Stanford CoreNLP以及四个较新的替代解析器。我们对句法语言变迁的分析超越了线性依存距离,探索了15个与依存距离最小化(DDM)相关和/或基于树图属性的度量指标,例如树高和度方差。尽管我们有证据表明,近期在现代树库上训练的解析器不会受到我们历史数据中拼写变化和OCR错误等数据“噪声”的严重影响,但我们发现句法语言变迁的结果对所涉及的解析器较为敏感,这提醒我们在评估句法语言变迁时不应像先前工作那样仅使用单一解析器。我们还表明,在所考察的时间段内,英语和德语的句法语言变迁在不同度量指标上大体相似:在我们考察的案例中,只有4%在德语和英语的句法指标上升与下降趋势上得出相反结论。我们还发现,句法度量的变化似乎更频繁地出现在句子长度分布的尾部。据我们所知,本研究是利用现代NLP技术对近期英语和德语语料库中的句法语言变迁进行的最全面分析。

英文摘要:

Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key indicator of language processing difficulty and working memory load. The current paper looks at diachronic trends in syntactic language change in both English and German, using corpora of parliamentary debates from the last c. 160 years. We base our observations on five dependency parsers, including the widely used Stanford CoreNLP as well as 4 newer alternatives. Our analysis of syntactic language change goes beyond linear dependency distance and explores 15 metrics relevant to dependency distance minimization (DDM) and/or based on tree graph properties, such as the tree height and degree variance. Even though we have evidence that recent parsers trained on modern treebanks are not heavily affected by data 'noise' such as spelling changes and OCR errors in our historic data, we find that results of syntactic language change are sensitive to the parsers involved, which is a caution against using a single parser for evaluating syntactic language change as done in previous work. We also show that syntactic language change over the time period investigated is largely similar between English and German for the different metrics explored: only 4% of cases we examine yield opposite conclusions regarding upwards and downtrends of syntactic metrics across German and English. We also show that changes in syntactic measures seem to be more frequent at the tails of sentence length distributions. To our best knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of syntactic language change using modern NLP technology in recent corpora of English and German.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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