On the Structural Complexity of Natural Language Sentences

The objective of this pal)er is to [brmalize the intuition al)out l,he comph;xity of syntactic structures. We propose a definition of structm:al COml)h'xity such that sentences ranked by our definition as more COml)h;x are gen(;rally more diI'ficult lbr humans to process. We justify the definition by showing how it is ahle to account for several seemingly unrelated phenomena in natural languages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Dekang Lin
• Keywords: COLING 1996, COLING 2008, He, Intuition Al)out L, Syntactic Structures