Dependency Grammar for Typology
Erica Biagetti
Dependency Grammar for Typology
Workshop @ ALT 15 in Singapore; December 4-6, 2024
New venue: Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
New dates: December 4-6, 2024
New abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2014
This workshop aims to bring together typologists working using dependency-annotated resources for quantitative typological research. We aim to include both new studies that peruse dependency-annotated corpora to answer typological questions, as well as more critical authors who point to the limitations of ‘dependency grammar for typology’. This also includes proposals on how quantitative typology can be conducted using heterogeneous data sources and the development of new resources, as long as a focus on comparative research is maintained.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
➔ Synchronic comparative studies on variation that can only be accessed using corpora, such as word order (Levshina 2019, Talamo & Verkerk 2022);
➔ Comparative studies that employ such resources to uncover universal principles of grammar, including dependency length optimization (Futrell, Mahowald & Gibson 2015; Liu 2021, Yingqi, Blasi & Bickel 2022), word order universals (Choi et al. 2021, Gerdes et al. 2021, Yan & Liu 2023), the memory-surprisal trade-off (Hahn, Degen & Futrell 2021);
➔ Diachronic studies of language change, such as the evolution rate of word order in main and subordinate clauses (Jing et al. 2023) or word order change (Hahn & Xu 2022);
➔ Theoretical challenges in annotation, such as the universality of syntactic labels, as well as of parts of speech, morpho-syntactic features, and tokenization (Croft et al. 2017, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, Sinnemäki and Haakana 2020, Hohn 2021);
➔ Development of new resources, in particular with respect to low-resource languages, starting from different type of texts (corpora, fieldwork notes, existing treebanks, Wikipedia, grammars, etc.) (Zariquiey et al. 2022, Kahane et al. 2023);
➔ Projects that employ such resources to go beyond sentence-level syntactic dependencies by developing additional layers of annotation for studying discourse and information structure, among other levels;
➔ Robustness and statistical validity of typological quantitative measures on the basis of different theoretical approaches and annotation schema (Gerdes et al. 2018, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, Yan & Liu 2019).
➔ Limits of dependency grammar for typology: issues such as unbalanced sampling, limitations of annotation in terms of availability, quality, as well as ‘missing’ annotation, and heterogeneousness of the annotation across treebanks, both in terms of application and quality.
We envision a worthwhile exchange between more traditional typologists and typologists who have already worked with these resources. If you want to join us, please submit your abstract to ALT15, explicitly indicating that it is intended for the workshop "Dependency Grammar for Typology".
Instructions on how to submit abstracts can be found on the ALT2024 page: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/soh/news-events/events/alt-2024/call-for-papers ---- Abstracts are due April 15th!