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Junior Researcher Conference - Measuring Language Complexity

When Sep 12, 2019 09:00 AM to
Sep 13, 2019 06:00 PM
Where FRIAS, Albertstr. 19, Seminar Room
Contact Name
Contact Phone +49 (0)761 203-97353
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Language complexity has been a hot and controversial topic in the past decade which still engages researchers from diverse areas of linguistics and beyond. This workshop aims to bring together complexity researchers from typology, second language acquisition research, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, language evolution and other related fields. The goal is to evaluate and compare different measures of language complexityby means of a shared task.

The workshop will be organised into traditional keynote talks and presentations of the shared task. We will conclude the workshop with an interactive session in which the different measures will be evaluated. While the workshop is open for discussion of all topics relevant to research on language complexity, we will specifically focus on the following practical and theoretical issues:

  • How do different complexity metrics correlate across parallel and non-parallel corpora, and other types of data?
  • How well do different complexity metrics deal with different language types, i.e. are some language types/families easier or more consistently measurable than others?
  • How well do measures within each domain correlate? Is it true that morphological complexity measures show better agreement than syntactic complexity measures (cf. Berdicevskis et al. 2018. Using Universal Dependencies in cross-linguistic complexity research. In: Proceedings of the Universal Dependencies Workshop 2018, EMNLP, Brussels, Belgium. Association of Computational Linguistics.)
  • How robust are trade-offs, such as between morphology and syntax, across different measures and corpora?
  • How do corpus-based complexity metrics correlate with the feature-based complexity information available in The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)?



Katharina Ehret
Alice Julie Blumenthal-Dramé
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis
Christian Bentz


Keynote Speakers:

Michael Cysouw
María Dolores Jiménez-López
Vera Kempe
Folkert Kuiken
Evie Malaia


Homepage of the workshop 

Preliminary Programme