Why is this language complex? Cherry-pick the optimal set of features in multilingual treebanks

Abstract This paper investigates linguistic complexity across natural languages from a corpus-based perspective and relies on the assumptions of linguistic profiling as a methodological framework. We focus in particular on the domain of syntactic complexity and analyze the distribution of a set of features taken as proxies of complexity phenomena at sentence level, which were extracted from 63 treebanks annotated according to the Universal Dependencies formalism. This dataset guarantees that the features considered are modeling the same linguistic phenomena in different treebanks, allowing reliable comparison among languages. We show that our approach is able to identify tendencies of structural proximity between languages not necessarily in line with typologically-supported classification, thus shedding light on new corpus-based findings.