2015/10/01 by Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, Futrell, Richard +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning in Bioinformatics #Rough Sets and Fuzzy Logic
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1510.00436
openalex publication_date 2015/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and Gómez-Rodríguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015). First, we acknowledge error in failing to acknowledge Liu (2008)'s previous work on corpora of 20 languages with similar aims. A correction will appear in PNAS. Nevertheless, we argue that our work provides novel, strong evidence for dependency length minimization as a universal quantitative property of languages, beyond this previous work, because it provides baselines which focus on word order preferences. Second, we argue that our choices of baselines were appropriate because they control for alternative theories.