Quantifying syntax similarity with a polynomial representation of dependency trees

TL;DR

This paper introduces a polynomial-based graph method to accurately quantify and compare syntactic structures in dependency trees, enabling cross-linguistic analysis and diversity measurement.

Contribution

It presents a novel polynomial representation for dependency trees that captures detailed syntactic information and facilitates syntax similarity and diversity analysis.

Findings

Effective differentiation of tree structures using the polynomial method

Application to multilingual datasets reveals syntactic similarities and differences

Potential for measuring syntax diversity across corpora

Abstract

We introduce a graph polynomial that distinguishes tree structures to represent dependency grammar and a measure based on the polynomial representation to quantify syntax similarity. The polynomial encodes accurate and comprehensive information about the dependency structure and dependency relations of words in a sentence. We apply the polynomial-based methods to analyze sentences in the Parallel Universal Dependencies treebanks. Specifically, we compare the syntax of sentences and their translations in different languages, and we perform a syntactic typology study of available languages in the Parallel Universal Dependencies treebanks. We also demonstrate and discuss the potential of the methods in measuring syntax diversity of corpora.