2024/08/22 by Yu Wang, Hendrik Buschmeier, Wang, Yu +1
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #Text Readability and Simplification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.12177
openalex publication_date 2024/08/22 · openalex created_date 2024/12/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.