Figure 1.

The dependency parsing of the sentence “I am the grandmother of a wonderful grandson” is depicted. The ids of the words, representing the position of the words in the sentence, are indicated with numbers 0–7 and the word “grandmother” is identified by the parser as the root word. The arrows have the direction from the head/root word to the dependent/children, the dependency distance between the pair is indicated on the arrow head and equals the difference of their id values. The words “the,” “am,” “I,” and “grandson” are dependent from the word “grandmother” and the words “wonderful,” “a,” and “of” are dependent from the word “grandson.” The MDD of this sentence based on the Equation (11) equals (3+2+1+4+3+2+1)/7= 2.28.