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This contribution sketches a very personal and subjective view on the past 50 years of linguistics in the Netherlands as well as on the next 50 years in linguistics in the Netherlands. With this we hope to be able to apply the language acquisition simulation techniques mentioned above to acquire properties of a language for which we have nothing but a (sufficiently large) parallel corpus containing a text in a different language for which a treebank does exist. Though it is almost a certainty that in most of the next 50 years linguistics will have to be carried out without the active involvement of Noam Chomsky, I am confident that the influence of his work on linguistics will continue unabatedly. [Extracted from the article]

Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve "free" translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS-tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]