Exploring language relations through syntactic distances and geographic proximity

arXiv:2403.18430v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their relatedness, especially in less studied linguistic levels such as syntax. Here, we explore linguistic distances using series of parts of speech (POS) extracted from the Universal Dependencies dataset. Within an information-theoretic framework, we show that employing POS trigrams maximizes the possibility of capturing syntactic …

abstract arxiv cs.cl diverse explore families language languages physics.data-an physics.soc-ph relations stat.ap syntax through type understanding