A Data-free Universal Prior over Syntactic Structures
The probabilities of syntactic structures in human languages are assumed to emerge fully from language-specific experience. Here, I show that a universal prior over syntactic structures emerges from a model of human language production, in which words are progressively integrated into syntactic structure. Without fitting any parameters to specific language data, the resulting prior assigns higher probabilities to attested than to random dependency trees in all 138 typologically diverse languages examined. These prior probabilities correlate positively with those estimated from corpora in 33 of 34 languages. The results indicate that part of the probability structure of syntax can arise in...
| Authors | Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 October 2026 |
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