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SUMMARY:Zipf's law and the grammar of languages: A (potential) cross-lingu
 istic measure of syntheticity - Christian Bentz\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20130510T110000Z
DTEND:20130510T120000Z
UID:TALK43932@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ekaterina Kochmar
DESCRIPTION:Zipf's law denotes one of the most well known quantitative rel
 ationships in NLP. However\, it is widely held to be linguistically 'shall
 ow' and is ignored by historical and typological linguists. This talk will
  present evidence that Zipf distributions for parallel texts (~400 languag
 es) differ systematically. The variation seems to be due to differing gram
 matical encoding strategies of the respective languages. This observation 
 could help to rate languages on a quantitative syntheticity scale. Potenti
 al implications for theories of language change and language evolution wil
 l be discussed.
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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