Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance

Haitao Liu; Richard Hudson; Zhiwei Feng

doi:10.1515/CLLT.2009.007

Article

Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance

Haitao Liu , Richard Hudson and Zhiwei Feng

Published/Copyright: October 16, 2009

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Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

From the journal Volume 5 Issue 2

Abstract

This article describes a method for calculating the ‘dependency distance’ between the words in a text – i.e. the number of words that separate each word from the word on which it depends syntactically – and reports the results of applying this method to a Chinese treebank. This study shows that Chinese dependencies tend strongly to be governor-final and that the mean dependency distance of words is much higher for Chinese than for other languages that have been studied including English, German and Japanese. It is unclear whether this difference means that Chinese is syntactically more difficult to process.

Keywords:: Dependency syntax; Chinese treebank; dependency distance

Published Online: 2009-10-16

Published in Print: 2009-September

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/CLLT.2009.007

Keywords for this article

Dependency syntax; Chinese treebank; dependency distance