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Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences

What it is about

The paper asks whether syntax changes over time in English and German parliamentary debates, roughly the last 160 years, can be measured reliably with automatic parsers. Five dependency parsers (including Stanford CoreNLP and four newer ones) parse the historical text, and 15 metrics are computed: mean dependency distance and its variants, plus tree-shape measures such as tree height and degree variance. Newer parsers are not much hurt by OCR and spelling noise (metric rankings on clean versus noisy data correlate at Spearman 0.926). But the trend conclusions depend on the parser: most parser pairs agree only moderately (average Cohen's kappa 0.4 to 0.6). Using a majority vote of at least three parsers out of five, 32 of 135 English-German trend pairs agree, 4 disagree, and 99 are not comparable because one or both languages show no significant trend. The authors conclude that the two languages change in a largely similar way, and that sentence length matters: changes concentrate at the tails of the length distribution.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 8. Word order and phrase structure (word order over the centuries) and 1. The period, the register and the texts Mova reads (the texts and periods). The code is tools/treeagree (agreement vote), tools/parsecmp (parser comparison) and en/src/parse.rs. The measures: per-metric trend agreement across parsers, and the sentence-length distribution by period. Mova's parser is one parser, so the vote can only be run once a second parser is in the loop; say so in any report.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 2402.11549

@misc{chen2024syntactic,
  title = {{Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences}},
  author = {Chen, Yanran and Zhao, Wei and Breitbarth, Anne and Stoeckel, Manuel and Mehler, Alexander and Eger, Steffen},
  year = {2024},
  eprint = {2402.11549},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11549}
}

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