@inproceedings{chuprinko-etal-2025-distance,
title = "Distance and Projectivity as Predictors of Sentence Acceptability in Free Word Order Languages",
author = "Chuprinko, Kirill and
Novozhilov, Artem and
Stepanov, Arthur",
editor = "Haji{\v{c}}ov{\'a}, Eva and
Kahane, Sylvain",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)",
month = aug,
year = "2025",
address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.depling-1.11/",
pages = "108--119",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-290-9",
abstract = "This study investigates how two core metrics rooted in Dependency Grammar, Minimal Dependency Distance (MDD) and projectivity, predict sentence acceptability in Russian and Serbo-Croatian. Using exhaustive word order permutations in controlled five-word sentences, we model how these metrics relate to acceptability judgments in two psycholinguistic experiments. While MDD has been widely studied as a processing constraint, projectivity violations have received less attention in acceptability modeling. We show that both significantly affect judgments, with projectivity playing a surprisingly strong role. In addition, Serbo-Croatian{'}s rigid clitic placement provides a natural test case for disentangling grammatical from processing constraints. Our findings offer a computationally precise, dependency-based model of acceptability that advances cognitively grounded language modeling for free word order languages."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Distance and Projectivity as Predictors of Sentence Acceptability in Free Word Order Languages
%A Chuprinko, Kirill
%A Novozhilov, Artem
%A Stepanov, Arthur
%Y Hajičová, Eva
%Y Kahane, Sylvain
%S Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)
%D 2025
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Ljubljana, Slovenia
%@ 979-8-89176-290-9
%F chuprinko-etal-2025-distance
%X This study investigates how two core metrics rooted in Dependency Grammar, Minimal Dependency Distance (MDD) and projectivity, predict sentence acceptability in Russian and Serbo-Croatian. Using exhaustive word order permutations in controlled five-word sentences, we model how these metrics relate to acceptability judgments in two psycholinguistic experiments. While MDD has been widely studied as a processing constraint, projectivity violations have received less attention in acceptability modeling. We show that both significantly affect judgments, with projectivity playing a surprisingly strong role. In addition, Serbo-Croatian’s rigid clitic placement provides a natural test case for disentangling grammatical from processing constraints. Our findings offer a computationally precise, dependency-based model of acceptability that advances cognitively grounded language modeling for free word order languages.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.depling-1.11/
%P 108-119
Markdown (Informal)
[Distance and Projectivity as Predictors of Sentence Acceptability in Free Word Order Languages](https://aclanthology.org/2025.depling-1.11/) (Chuprinko et al., DepLing-SyntaxFest 2025)
ACL