Posted: February 10th, 2017

What might be the significance of the depth and breadth of a parse tree relative to the sentence it represents?

Trees occur in various venues in computer science: decision trees in algorithms, search trees, and so on. In linguistics, one encounters trees as well, typically asparse trees, which are essentially sentence diagrams, such as those you might have had to do in primary school, breaking a natural-language sentence into its components—clauses, subclauses, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. What might be the significance of the depth and breadth of a parse tree relative to the sentence it represents? If you need to, look up parse tree and natural language processing on the Internet to see some examples.