Publications & Citing

Citing the library in academic works

In order to cite the library appropriately, all publications “About LAL” must be cited; these are the publications where we, the developers of LAL, presented the library in conferences, or in journal articles. By citing these publications you are acknowledging our efforts put into making this tool. Besides, the exact version of the LAL being used must also be cited via its Zenodo DOI. These references can be found in their corresponding sections in the “Download” page.

Then, and this is the most difficult part, users must also cite the papers where are described the algorithms they use. For example, if a user calculates the minimum sum of edge lengths, then that user must cite either Shiloach’s or Fan Chung’s paper on how to calculate such value (one of the two, or both, depending on the method(s) used). These references can be found in the C++ documentation of each method, and also listed here below. Users can also find the bibtex-formatted references in this file in the github repository of LAL.

About LAL

Publications presenting LAL (to be cited when using LAL).

• Alemany-Puig, L., Esteban, J. L & Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2021). The Linear Arrangement Library. A new tool for research on syntactic dependency structures. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021). ACL Anthology: https://aclanthology.org/2021.quasy-1.1. arXiv url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02512. Take a look at the poster here.

That use LAL or use precursor code integrated in LAL

That is, publications that use LAL directly or that have used precursor code from it.

• Alemany-Puig, L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Baselines in Dependency Syntax. Chapter in International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd edition. In: Reference Collection in Social Sciences (RCSS). June 2026. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00961-3.
• Ezquerro, A. & Gómez-Rodríguez, C. & Vilares, D. (2025). Better Benchmarking LLMs for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), 121-135. Link.
• Muñoz-Ortiz, A. & Gómez-Rodríguez, C. & Vilares, D. (2024). Contrasting linguistic patterns in Human and LLM-generated news text. Artificial Intelligence Revie. Aug 23;57 (10):256. DOI: 10.1007/s10462-024-10903-2.
• Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. & Gómez-Rodríguez, C. (2021). Dependency distance minimization predicts compression. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021), 45-57. Link.
• Esteban, J. L., Ferrer-i-Cancho, R., & Gómez-Rodríguez, C. (2016). The scaling of the minimum sum of edge lengths in uniformly random trees. Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 063401. DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/2016/06/063401.

Our formulas/algorithms in LAL

Publications authored by the creators of LAL that present formulas/algorithms that are implemented in the latest version of LAL.

• Alemany-Puig, L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Linear time calculation of the expected sum of edge lengths in planar linearizations of trees. Journal of Language Modelling. Volume 12, Number 1 (2024). DOI: 10.15398/jlm.v12i1.362.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Esteban, J. L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Maximum Linear Arrangement Problem for Trees under projectivity and planarity. Information Processing Letters. Volume 183 (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.ipl.2023.106400.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Esteban, J. L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. On The Maximum Linear Arrangement Problem for Trees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04487.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Esteban, J. L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Minimum projective linearization of trees in linear time. Information Processing Letters. Volume 174 (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.ipl.2021.106204.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Linear time calculation of the expected sum of edge lengths in projective linearizations of trees. Journal of Computational Linguistics. . DOI: 10.1162/coli_a_00442.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2020). Fast calculation of the variance of edge crossings in random linear arrangements. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03258.
• Alemany-Puig, L. and Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2020). Edge crossings in random linear arrangements, Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 023403. DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/ab6845.
• Lluís Alemany-Puig. Edge crossings in linear arrangements: from theory to algorithms and applications. Master Thesis (M. Sc.), 2019. Handle: https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/168124.
• Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2019). The sum of edge lengths in random linear arrangements, Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 053401. DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/ab11e2.
• Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, and Juan Luis Esteban. Are crossing dependencies really scarce? Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 493:311–329, 2018.
• Esteban, J. L. & R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2017). A correction on Shiloach’s algorithm for minimum linear arrangement of trees. SIAM Journal of Computing 46(3), 1146-1151. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1137/15M1046289.
• Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho. A stronger null hypothesis for crossing dependencies. CoRR, abs/1410.5485, 2014. DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/108/58003.

Formulas/algorithms by other researchers in LAL

Publications that present formulas/algorithms implemented in the latest version of LAL that are not original contributions of the creators of LAL.

• Mark Anderson, David Vilares, and Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez. Artificially Evolved Chunks for Morphosyntactic Analysis. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2019), pages 133–143, Paris, France, 08 2019. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI: 10.18653/v1/W19-7815.
• Mark Anderson. An Unsolicited Soliloquy on Dependency Parsing. PhD thesis, Universidade da Coruña, 2021.
• Ján Macutek, Radek Cech, and Marine Courtin. The Menzerath-Altmann law in syntactic structure revisited. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021), pages 65–73, Sofia, Bulgaria, 12 2021. Association for Computational Linguistics.
• Daniel Gildea and David Temperley. Optimizing grammars for minimum dependency length. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pages 184–191, Prague, Czech Republic, June. URL: https://aclanthology.org/P07-1024.
• The GNU multiple precision arithmetic library. https://gmplib.org/. Accessed: 2020-03-24.
• Luka Marohnić. Graph theory package for giac/xcas – reference manual. https://usermanual.wiki/Document/graphtheoryusermanual.346702481/view Accessed: 2020-01-13.
• Tanay Wakhare, Eric Wityk, and Charles R. Johnson. The proportion of trees that are linear. Discrete Mathematics, 343(10):112008, 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.disc.2020.112008.
• Patrick Bennett, Sean English, and Maria Talanda-Fisher. Weighted Turán problems with applications. Discrete Mathematics, 342(8):2165–2172, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/j.disc.2019.04.007.
• Sylvain Kahane, Chunxiao Yan, and Marie-Amélie Botalla. What are the limitations on the flux of syntactic dependencies? evidence from ud treebanks. pages 73–82, 9 2017. URL: https://aclanthology.org/W17-6510.
• Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33):10336–10341 (2015).
• Yingqi Jing and Haitao Liu. Mean Hierarchical Distance: Augmenting Mean Dependency Distance. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015), (Depling):161–170, (2015).
• Giorgio Satta, Emily Pitler, Sampath Kannan, and Mitchell Marcus. Finding Optimal 1-Endpoint-Crossing Trees. pages 13–24, 2013. DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00206.
• Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, John Carroll, and David Weir. Dependency Parsing Schemata and Mildly Non-Projective Dependency Parsing. Computational Linguistics, 37:541–586, 2011.
• Haitao Liu. Dependency direction as a means of word-order typology: a method based on dependency treebanks. Lingua, 120(6):1567–1578, 2010.
• Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho. Euclidean distance between syntactically linked words. Physical Review E, 70(5):5, 2004. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.70.056135.
• Robert A. Hochberg and Matthias F. Stallmann. Optimal one-page tree embeddings in linear time. Information Processing Letters, 87(2):59–66, 2003. DOI: 10.1016/S0020-0190(03)00261-8.
• Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Introduction to Algorithms. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2nd edition, 2001.
• Mikhail Anatolievich Iordanskii. Minimal numberings of the vertices of trees — approximate approach. In Lothar Budach, Rais Gatic Bukharajev, and Oleg Borisovic Lupanov, editors, Fundamentals of Computation Theory, pages 214–217, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1987. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Robert Alan Wright, Bruce Richmond, Andrew Odlyzko, and Brendan D. McKay. Constant time generation of free trees. SIAM Journal on Computing, 15:540–548, 05. 1986.
• Fan R. K. Chung. On optimal linear arrangements of trees. Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 10(1):43–60, 1984.
• Herbert S. Wilf. The uniform selection of free trees. Journal of Algorithms, 2:204–207, 1981.
• Terry Beyer and Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi. Constant time generation of rooted trees. SIAM Journal on Computing, 9(4):706–712, 1980.
• Yossi Shiloach. A minimum linear arrangement algorithm for undirected trees. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 8(1):15–32, 1979.
• Albert Nijenhuis and Herbert S. Wilf. Combinatorial Algorithms: For Computers and Hard Calculators. Academic Press, Inc., Orlando, FL, USA, 2nd edition, 1978.
• A. V. Aho, J. E. Hopcroft, and J. D. Ullman. The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Addison-Wesley series in computer science and information processing. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Michigan University, 1st edition, 1974.
• Frank Harary and Allen J. Schwenk. The number of caterpillars. Discrete Mathematics, 6:359–365, 1973.
• Frank Harary. Graph Theory. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, USA, 2nd edition, 1969.
• Richard Otter. Annals of Mathematics The Number of Trees. 49(3):583–599, 1948.
• H. Prüfer. Neuer Beweis eines Satzes über Permutationen. Arch. Math. Phys, 27:742–744, 1918.
• N. J. A. Sloane. The online encyclopedia of integer sequences – A000055 – Number of trees with n unlabeled nodes. https://oeis.org/A000055. Accessed: 2019-12-28.
• N. J. A. Sloane. The online encyclopedia of integer sequences – A000081 – Number of unlabeled rooted trees with n nodes (or connected functions with a fixed point). https://oeis.org/A000081. Accessed: 2019-03-31.
• N. J. A. Sloane. The online encyclopedia of integer sequences – A338706 – Number of 2-linear trees on n nodes. https://oeis.org/A338706. Accessed: 2022-10-07.