Dear all,
A reminder from the bulletin - tomorrow at 10:00-11:00, Martin Kroon (former
ComSyn co-organiser) will defend his PhD thesis entitled Towards the automatic
detection of syntactic differences. Martin's project is both from Linguistics
and Digital Humanities (see summary below). You are very welcome to attend the
defence, either in person in the Academiegebouw or online via the
livestream<https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/academic-staff/livestream-phd-defence>.
You can find more details (including the link to the Leiden Repository where
the thesis will be made available open access after the defence)
here<https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2022/11/towards-the-automatic-detection-of-syntactic-differences>.
Towards the automatic detection of syntactic differences
"Natural language syntax is the system of combinatorial rules that builds
complex hierarchical structures, i.e. phrases and clauses, out of individual
words and morphemes. The insight that the words of a sentence are organized
both linearly and hierarchically, i.e. as phrases that contain phrases that
contain phrases, is central in modern linguistics. The field of theoretical
comparative syntactic research aims to identify the range and limits of
syntactic variation between natural languages by comparing their structures and
describing the syntactic similarities and differences, and to capture them in a
cross-linguistic formal theory.
This dissertation centers around the question whether syntactic differences
between languages can be detected automatically, and if so, how. With the
enormous number of natural languages and dialects, the very high level of
variation they exhibit between one another, and the technically infinite number
of possible sentences per language or dialect, systematic manual comparison is
a hugely daunting task. The field would therefore significantly benefit from
the (partial) automatization of the process, as it would increase the scale,
speed, systematicity and reproducibility of research.
Over the course of five chapters it is shown through case studies involving
English, Dutch, German, Czech and Hungarian that correct hypotheses on
syntactic differences between languages can be generated automatically from
parallel corpora through the use of the minimum description length principle,
counting mismatches between part-of-speech pattern occurrences, word alignment
and mapping annotation from an annotated language onto another unannotated
language. The tools developed for the purposes of this research work well and
can aid a linguist significantly in their search for differences or
similarities, but do not replace the human researcher."
Best wishes,
Lis (on behalf of the ComSyn organisers)
