Morten H. Christiansen

Leon Strømberg-Derczynski, Manuel R. Ciosici, Rebekah Baglini et al.

Danish language technology has been hindered by a lack of broad-coverage corpora at the scale modern NLP prefers. This paper describes the Danish Gigaword Corpus, the result of a focused effort to provide a diverse and freely-available one billion word corpus of Danish text. The Danish Gigaword corpus covers a wide array of time periods, domains, speakers' socio-economic status, and Danish dialects.

Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Morten H. Christiansen, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic dependencies between constituents, independent of the computational limitations of the human brain. Here, we evaluate this independence assumption by sampling sentences uniformly from the space of possible syntactic structures. We find that the average dependency distance between syntactically related words, a proxy for memory limitations, is less than expected by chance in a collection of state-of-the-art classes of dependency grammars. Our findings indicate that memory limitations have permeated grammatical descriptions, suggesting that it may be impossible to build a parsimonious theory of human linguistic productivity independent of non-linguistic cognitive constraints.