English

A Modular Architecture for Typologically Controlled Lexicon Generation

Computation and Language 2026-05-29 v1

Abstract

Constructing artificial lexicons that are pronounceable, typologically plausible, and semantically structured remains an open challenge in computational linguistics. Existing conlang generators either lack formal phonotactic guarantees or delegate generation to opaque, non-reproducible LLM-based pipelines. We propose a modular framework that samples phoneme inventories from PHOIBLE, generates word forms under interchangeable phonological grammars (deterministic, OT, and MaxEnt), and assigns meanings via a Swadesh--Leipzig--Jakarta ontology with explicit form--meaning alignment. Evaluation on character nn-gram perplexity, log-likelihood, and KL divergence against PHOIBLE across lexicon sizes of 100-5,000 forms shows that probabilistic grammars consistently outperform deterministic and random baselines on both phonotactic coherence and typological realism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.28824,
  title  = {A Modular Architecture for Typologically Controlled Lexicon Generation},
  author = {Sankalp Tattwadarshi Swain and Dhruv Kumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28824},
  year   = {2026}
}