Natural Language Complexity and Machine Learning

Eventhough complexity is a central notion in linguistics, until recently, it has not been widely researched in the area. During the 20th century, linguistic complexity was supposed to be invariant. In general, recent work on language complexity takes an absolute perspective of the concept while the relative complexity approach –although considered as conceptually coherent– has hardly begun to be developed. In this paper, we introduce machine learning tools that can be used to calculate natural language complexity from a relative point of view by considering the process of first language acquisition.

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