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Christian Bentz, University of Cambridge
Friday 10 May 2013, 12:00-13:00
Zipf's law and the grammar of languages: A (potential) cross-linguistic measure of syntheticity
- đ¤ Speaker: Christian Bentz, University of Cambridge
- đ Date & Time: Friday 10 May 2013, 12:00 - 13:00
- đ Venue: FW26, Computer Laboratory
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Ekaterina Kochmar
Abstract
Zipf’s law denotes one of the most well known quantitative relationships in NLP . However, it is widely held to be linguistically ‘shallow’ and is ignored by historical and typological linguists. This talk will present evidence that Zipf distributions for parallel texts (~400 languages) differ systematically. The variation seems to be due to differing grammatical encoding strategies of the respective languages. This observation could help to rate languages on a quantitative syntheticity scale. Potential implications for theories of language change and language evolution will be discussed.
Series This talk is part of the NLIP Seminar Series series.
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