On the relation between dependency distance, crossing dependencies, and parsing. Comment on 'Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages' by Haitao Liu et al

摘要

Liu et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive account of research on dependencydistance in human languages. While the article is a very rich and useful reporton this complex subject, here I will expand on a few specific issues whereresearch in computational linguistics (specifically natural languageprocessing) can inform DDM research, and vice versa. These aspects have notbeen explored much in the article by Liu et al. or elsewhere, probably due tothe little overlap between both research communities, but they may provideinteresting insights for improving our understanding of the evolution of humanlanguages, the mechanisms by which the brain processes and understandslanguage, and the construction of effective computer systems to achieve thisgoal.