Probing the space of grammatical variation: induction of cross-lingual grammatical constraints from treebanks

The paper reports on a detailed quantitative analysis of distributional language data of both Italian and Czech, highlighting the relative contribution of a number of distributed grammatical factors to sentence-based identification of subjects and direct objects. The work uses a Maximum Entropy model of stochastic resolution of conflicting grammatical constraints and is demonstrably capable of putting explanatory theoretical accounts to the test of usage-based empirical verification.