Experiments on human incremental parsing

Abstract

Experiments have been conducted in which the subjects incrementally constructed dependency trees of Russian sentences. The subject was successively presented with growing initial segments of a sentence, and had to draw syntactic links between the last word of the segment and the previous words. The subject was also shown a limited right context – a fixed number of words following the last word of the segment. The results of the experiments show that the right context of 1 or 2 words is sufficient for confident incremental parsing of Russian narrative sentences.