Probability Distribution of Dependencies Based on a Chinese Dependency Treebank

Abstract

This article investigates probability distributions of the dependency relation extracted from a Chinese dependency treebank. The author shows the frequency distributions of dependency type, of word class both as a dependent and a governor, of verb as a governor, and of noun as a dependent. The fitting results reveal that most of the investigated distributions are excellently fitted with a modified right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution. In the analysis of exponential regressions, most of the determination coefficients R ² are very good, which is an alternative evidence that the investigated distributions are fitted well.

Acknowledgments

We thank the JQL referees for their insightful comments and Zhao Yiyi for annotating the Chinese treebank. This work is partly supported by Communication University of China as one of “211” key projects.

Notes

¹Perhaps it is more correct to use POS (part of speech) to replace ‘word class’, because in a dependency treebank we have to use more POS tags than word classes in traditional grammar.