Exploring diachronic syntactic shifts with dependency length: the case of scientific English

What it is about

The authors test whether scientific English became more efficient over time, in the sense of shorter dependencies. They use the Royal Society Corpus for 1665 to 1996, which has 295,895,749 tokens, and parse it with Stanford CoreNLP. On 1,500 sampled head tags the parser is 91.1% accurate. For sentences of 26 tokens the sum of dependency lengths falls from 81.6 (1650 to 1700) to 77.1 (1800 to 1850) and then stays at 77.2. For sentences of 52 tokens it falls from 249 to 239. Short dependencies, especially nominal premodification, become more frequent. The labels parataxis and coordination could not be interpreted.

Ideas

• I1. Length replication: compute the sum of dependency lengths for sentences of 13, 26 and 52 tokens in EWT and in GUM (test only), and check whether the trend holds across lengths, as the paper argues it does.
• I2. Label audit: in en ud-eval, report head accuracy for parataxis and conj separately. The paper found these labels unusable for its purpose.
• I3. Head-accuracy sample: check 1,500 head tags of en parses of our own historical-style text, as the paper does, with two annotators, and report the share correct.

For Mova

The code is en ud-eval and en/src/ctx.rs; the chapter is 21. The simple clause. The paper's parser is CoreNLP, which our notes record as weaker than en on some constructions, so the numbers are not comparable. The Royal Society Corpus is outside our licence list.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{juzek2020exploring,
  title = {{Exploring diachronic syntactic shifts with dependency length: the case of scientific English}},
  author = {Juzek, Tom S and Krielke, Marie Pauline and Teich, Elke},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020)},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.udw-1.13/}
}

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