Syntactic Complexity

InterCorp release 16ud is annotated by several measures of syntactic complexity. They are specified as metadata for each sentence and each text, for each linguistically annotated language. In KonText, they can be displayed and queried like any other metadata items, such as author or sentence ID.

Two measures (maxNPLength and maxNPDepth) concern noun phrases, defined as subtrees headed by words whose upos is NOUN, PNOM or PRON.

Except for the mdd measure, punctuation and coordination is excluded.

• maxNPLength: number of words in the longest noun phrase
• maxNPDepth: number of embeddings in the noun phrase with the longest chain of embeddings
• sLength: sentence length = no. of words in the sentence (punctuation excluded)
• subRatio: subordination ratio = (no. of T-units + no. of clauses) / no. of T-units¹⁾
• maxTreeDepth: maximum number of clause embeddings (coordination does not count)
• mdd: mean dependency distance: average number of word boundaries between words and their heads

The following measures are average values based on the measures for sentences. The mdd value is counted as the average for all words in the text.

• maxNPLengthAvg: average number of words in the longest noun phrase
• maxNPDepthAvg: average number of embeddings in the noun phrase with the longest chain of embeddings
• sLengthAvg: average sentence length = no. of words in the sentence (punctuation excluded)
• subRatioAvg: average subordination ratio = (no. of T-units + no. of clauses) / no. of T-units
• maxTreeDepthAvg: average maximum number of clause embeddings (coordination does not count)
• mdd: mean dependency distance: average number of word boundaries between words and their heads

In addition to syntactic complexity measures each text of sufficient length includes also two measures of lexical diversity.