The Syntactic Acceptability Dataset (Preview): A Resource for Machine Learning and Linguistic Analysis of English

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Juzek, Tom S
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Juzek, Tom S
author_facet Juzek, Tom S
contents We present a preview of the Syntactic Acceptability Dataset, a resource being designed for both syntax and computational linguistics research. In its current form, the dataset comprises 1,000 English sequences from the syntactic discourse: Half from textbooks and half from the journal Linguistic Inquiry, the latter to ensure a representation of the contemporary discourse. Each entry is labeled with its grammatical status ("well-formedness" according to syntactic formalisms) extracted from the literature, as well as its acceptability status ("intuitive goodness" as determined by native speakers) obtained through crowdsourcing, with highest experimental standards. Even in its preliminary form, this dataset stands as the largest of its kind that is publicly accessible. We also offer preliminary analyses addressing three debates in linguistics and computational linguistics: We observe that grammaticality and acceptability judgments converge in about 83% of the cases and that "in-betweenness" occurs frequently. This corroborates existing research. We also find that while machine learning models struggle with predicting grammaticality, they perform considerably better in predicting acceptability. This is a novel finding. Future work will focus on expanding the dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Syntactic Acceptability Dataset (Preview): A Resource for Machine Learning and Linguistic Analysis of English
Juzek, Tom S
Computation and Language
68T50
I.2.7; I.2.6; H.3.1
We present a preview of the Syntactic Acceptability Dataset, a resource being designed for both syntax and computational linguistics research. In its current form, the dataset comprises 1,000 English sequences from the syntactic discourse: Half from textbooks and half from the journal Linguistic Inquiry, the latter to ensure a representation of the contemporary discourse. Each entry is labeled with its grammatical status ("well-formedness" according to syntactic formalisms) extracted from the literature, as well as its acceptability status ("intuitive goodness" as determined by native speakers) obtained through crowdsourcing, with highest experimental standards. Even in its preliminary form, this dataset stands as the largest of its kind that is publicly accessible. We also offer preliminary analyses addressing three debates in linguistics and computational linguistics: We observe that grammaticality and acceptability judgments converge in about 83% of the cases and that "in-betweenness" occurs frequently. This corroborates existing research. We also find that while machine learning models struggle with predicting grammaticality, they perform considerably better in predicting acceptability. This is a novel finding. Future work will focus on expanding the dataset.
title The Syntactic Acceptability Dataset (Preview): A Resource for Machine Learning and Linguistic Analysis of English
topic Computation and Language
68T50
I.2.7; I.2.6; H.3.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18120