Syntactic Change Metrics for English and German Parliamentary Debates, 160 Years

Yanran Chen's dataset, last updated April 28, 2026, illustrates formatted annotation for syntactic language change. It contains 15 syntax metrics derived from dependency trees, analyzing English and German parliamentary debates over 160 years using 6 different parsers. The 5.5 KB XLS file presents results from a cross-lingual computational analysis.

Use Cases

• Analyzing diachronic trends in syntactic complexity based on dependency tree metrics.
• Comparing parser agreement on predicted language change trends across multiple NLP tools.
• Investigating syntactic change differences between short and long sentences based on sentence length distribution analysis.
• Conducting cross-lingual comparison of syntactic evolution between English and German.

Strengths

• Introduces a set of 15 syntax metrics incorporating both linear and tree graph properties.
• Employs a multi-parser approach using 6 different parsers to increase robustness.
• Analyzes a 160-year time range of parliamentary debates in two languages.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is very small at 5.5 KB, indicating limited scope.

Provenance

Source

Yanran Chen via figshare

Collection Method

Computational analysis of dependency trees from parliamentary debates using 6 parsers.

Time Range

Last 160 years

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-28 17:46:02; freshness should be verified

Geography

English and German language regions (likely UK and Germany)