In this paper, we describe the system we submitted to the SemEval-2012 Lexical Simplification Task. Our system (mmSystem) combines word frequency with decompositional semantics criteria based on syntactic structure in order to rank candidate substitutes of lexical forms of arbitrary syntactic complexity (oneword, multi-word, etc.) in descending order of (cognitive) simplicity. We believe that t...

the favorable gains gleaned from the provision of pre-task planning time (ptp) have struck a chord with sla researchers as they try to manipulate task features to promote language production and development. in a similar vein, the present study is a two-fold attempt to first compare the effect of the length of pre-task planning time on discourse-analytic measures in narrative written production...

We solve two open problems concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a left ideal or a suffix-closed language with n left quotients (that is, with state complexity n) is at most n n−1 + n − 1, and that of a two-sided ideal or a factor-closed language is at most n n−2 + (n − 2)2 n−2 + 1. Since these bounds are known to be reachable, this settles...

Automatic analysis of impaired speech for screening or diagnosis is a growing research field; however there are still many barriers to a fully automated approach. When automatic speech recognition is used to obtain the speech transcripts, sentence boundaries must be inserted before most measures of syntactic complexity can be computed. In this paper, we consider how language impairments can aff...

This investigation reports average length of communication units (C-units) in words and in morphemes for 95 4- to 6 1/2-year-old African American boys and girls from lower-income homes in metropolitan Detroit. Mean C-units increased across the age span of this sample, and kindergartners produced significantly longer C-units than preschoolers. The syntactic complexity of the children's language ...

In this paper we will be dealing with different levels of complexity in the processing of Italian, a Romance language inheriting many properties from Latin which make it an almost free word order language. The paper is concerned with syntactic complexity as measurable on the basis of the cognitive parser that incrementally builds up a syntactic representation to be used by the semantic componen...

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the current study, we used event-related functional magn...

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of statistically predictive syntactic features of complexity and the treatment of these features by humans when simplifying texts. To that end, we have used a list of the most five statistically predictive features obtained automatically and the Corpus of Basque Simplified Texts (CBST) to analyse how the syntactic phenomena in these features have...

We propose a new order-theoretic characterisation of the class of polytime computable functions. To this avail we define the small polynomial path order ([Formula: see text] for short). This termination order entails a new syntactic method to analyse the innermost runtime complexity of term rewrite systems fully automatically: for any rewrite system compatible with [Formula: see text] that empl...

In this paper we present a technique to reveal definitions and hypernym relations from text. Instead of using pattern matching methods that rely on lexico-syntactic patterns, we propose a technique which only uses syntactic dependencies between terms extracted with a syntactic parser. The assumption is that syntactic information are more robust than patterns when coping with length and complexi...