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Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance
Bibliographical information
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. 2009, 5:161-175.
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.
Keyword: dependency syntax, Chinese treebank, dependency distance
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