Relative Clauses as a Benchmark for Minimalist Parsing

Graf, Thomas, James Monette, and Chong Zhang

Abstract Minimalist grammars have been used recently in a series of papers to explain well-known contrasts in human sentence processing in terms of subtle structural differences. These proposals combine a top-down parser with complexity metrics that relate parsing difficulty to memory usage. So far, though, there has been no large-scale exploration of the space of viable metrics. Building on this earlier work, we compare the ability of 1,600 metrics to derive several processing effects observed with relative clauses, many of which have been proven difficult to unify. We show that among those 1,600 candidates, a few metrics (and only a few) can provide a unified account of all these contrasts. This is a welcome result for two reasons: First, it provides a novel account of extensively studied psycholinguistic data. Second, it significantly limits the number of viable metrics that may be applied to other phenomena, thus reducing theoretical indeterminacy.

Files [pdf]

@article{GrafEtAl17JLM,
  author = {Graf, Thomas and Monette, James and Zhang, Chong},
  title = {Relative Clauses as a Benchmark for {M}inimalist Parsing},
  year = {2017},
  journal = {Journal of Language Modelling},
  volume = {5},
  pages = {57--106},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v5i1.157},
  doi = {10.15398/jlm.v5i1.157},
}

More Output

Memory Usage Predicts Relative Difficulty in Human Sentence Processing

Graf, Thomas, James Monette, Robert Pasternak, and Chong Zhang

Files [pdf] [code]

@Misc{GrafEtAl16IACSposter,
  author    = {Graf, Thomas and Monette, James and Pasternak, Robert and Zhang, Chong},
  title     = {Memory Usage Predicts Relative Difficulty in Human Sentence Processing},
  year      = {2016},
  note      = {Poster presented at the {IACS} {R …

Formal Processing Theory, or Parsing Without Parsers

Sun 11 October 2015 | in Presentations |
| syntax | processing | relative clauses | Minimalist grammars | parsing | Chomsky in the audience |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract I argue that computational parsing research so far has operated at the wrong level(s) of granularity and that we should take a hint from formal language theory instead. Rather than compare the predictions of specific parsing models for specific phenomena, we …
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A Refined Notion of Memory Usage for Minimalist Parsing

Sat 25 July 2015 | in Papers |
| Minimalist grammars | parsing | relative clauses | movement | processing | Chinese | Japanese | Korean |

Graf, Thomas, Brigitta Fodor, James Monette, Gianpaul Rachiele, Aunika Warren, and Chong Zhang

Abstract Recently there has been a lot of interest in testing the processing predictions of a specific top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler 2012). Most of this work relies on memory-based difficulty …
read more
A Refined Notion of Memory Usage for Minimalist Parsing

Sat 25 July 2015 | in Presentations |
| Minimalist grammars | parsing | relative clauses | movement | processing | Chinese | Japanese | Korean |

Graf, Thomas, Brigitta Fodor, James Monette, Gianpaul Rachiele, Aunika Warren, and Chong Zhang

Abstract Recently there has been a lot of interest in testing the processing predictions of a specific top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler 2012). Most of this work relies on memory-based difficulty …
read more

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