33.3883, Books: Towards the Automatic Detection of Syntactic Differences: Kroon

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3883. Wed Dec 14 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3883, Books: Towards the Automatic Detection of Syntactic Differences: Kroon

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Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:32:19
From: Tessa Arneri [lotdissertations-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: Towards the Automatic Detection of Syntactic Differences: Kroon

 


Title: Towards the Automatic Detection of Syntactic Differences 
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series  

Publication Year: 2022 
Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
	   http://www.lotpublications.nl/
	

Book URL: https://www.lotpublications.nl/towards-the-automatic-detection-of-syntactic-differences 


Author: Martin Kroon

Paperback: ISBN:  9789460934148 Pages: 153 Price: Europe EURO 29


Abstract:

Natural language syntax is the system of combinatorial rules that builds
complex hierarchical structures, i.e. phrases and clauses, out of individual
words and morphemes. The insight that the words of a sentence are organized
both linearly and hierarchically, i.e. as phrases that contain phrases that
contain phrases, is central in modern linguistics. The field of theoretical
comparative syntactic research aims to identify the range and limits of
syntactic variation between natural languages by comparing their structures
and describing the syntactic similarities and differences, and to capture them
in a cross-linguistic formal theory.

This dissertation centers around the question whether syntactic differences
between languages can be detected automatically, and if so, how. With the
enormous number of natural languages and dialects, the very high level of
variation they exhibit between one another, and the technically infinite
number of possible sentences per language or dialect, systematic manual
comparison is a hugely daunting task. The field would therefore significantly
benefit from the (partial) automatization of the process, as it would increase
the scale, speed, systematicity and reproducibility of research.

Over the course of five chapters it is shown through case studies involving
English, Dutch, German, Czech and Hungarian that correct hypotheses on
syntactic differences between languages can be generated automatically from
parallel corpora through the use of the minimum description length principle,
counting mismatches between part-of-speech pattern occurrences, word alignment
and mapping annotation from an annotated language onto another unannotated
language. The tools developed for the purposes of this research work well and
can aid a linguist significantly in their search for differences or
similarities, but do not replace the human researcher.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Syntax


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=165993




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