Parameterized Complexity in its origins was considered by many researchers to be an exotic research eld, orthogonal to the standard way of classifying problems in complexity theory. In the last years however many surprising connections between Parameterized Complexity and classical areas in complexity theory have been established. Jörg Flum and Martin Grohe survey in this column some of these i...

We consider the diagnostic utility of various syntactic complexity measures when extracted from spoken language samples of healthy and cognitively impaired subjects. We examine measures calculated from manually built parse trees, as well as the same measures calculated from automatic parses. We show statistically significant differences between clinical subject groups for a number of syntactic ...

In the literature on verbal human-computer interaction there is general consent that humans’ preconceptualisations of the machine’s capabilities lead to conceptual and syntactic simplifications of the language used. We present a Wizard of Oz / Confederate study where humans communicate with either a system or an expert in a localization task in a complex building, in a setting which encourages ...

In experiments on a natural language information retrieval system that retrieves images based on textual captions, we show that syntactic complexity actually aids retrieval. We compare two types of captioned images, those characterized with full sentences in English, and those characterized by lists of words and phrases. The full-sentence captions show a 15% increase in retrieval accuracy over ...

Sentence complexity in children with autism and specific language impairment." MA (Master of Arts) thesis, iii ABSTRACT Children with high-functioning autism, children with specific language impairment, children with autism and language impairment, and controls produced sentences after a prompt to form a sentence using a specific word. The sentences were analyzed for length and syntactic comple...

With a dependency grammar, this study provides a unified method for calculating the syntactic complexity in linear and hierarchical dimensions. Two metrics, mean dependency distance (MDD) and mean hierarchical distance (MHD), one for each dimension, are adopted. Some results from the Czech-English dependency treebank are revealed: (1) Positive asymmetries in the distributions of the two metrics...

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that schizophrenic patients are impaired in the comprehension of sentences with complex syntax. We investigated the hypothesis that this syntactic comprehension impairment in schizophrenia is not a purely linguistic dysfunction, but rather the reflection of a cognitive sequence processing impairment that is revealed as task complexity increases. We tested 10 ...

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by a target's representational complexity in terms ...