On the structural complexity of natural language sentences

  • Authors:
  • Dekang Lin

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  • Venue:
  • COLING '96 Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

The objective of this paper is to formalize the intnition about the complexity of syntactic structures. We propose a definition of structural complexity such that sentences ranked by our definition as more complex are generally more difficult for humans to process. We justify the definition by showing how it is able to account for several seemingly unrelated phenomena in natural languages.