Title: On the relation between dependency distance, crossing dependencies, and parsing. Comment on "Dependency distance: a new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages" by Haitao Liu et al,
Abstract: Liu et al. (2017) provide a comprehensive account of research on dependency
distance in human languages. While the article is a very rich and useful report
on this complex subject, here I will expand on a few specific issues where
research in computational linguistics (specifically natural language
processing) can inform DDM research, and vice versa. These aspects have not
been explored much in the article by Liu et al. or elsewhere, probably due to
the little overlap between both research communities, but they may provide
interesting insights for improving our understanding of the evolution of human
languages, the mechanisms by which the brain processes and understands
language, and the construction of effective computer systems to achieve this
goal.