English

Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl

Computation and Language 2018-08-14 v1

Abstract

We use two small parallel corpora for comparing the morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. These are languages that belong to different linguistic families, the latter are low-resourced. We take into account two quantitative criteria, on one hand the distribution of types over tokens in a corpus, on the other, perplexity and entropy as indicators of word structure predictability. We show that a language can be complex in terms of how many different morphological word forms can produce, however, it may be less complex in terms of predictability of its internal structure of words.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.04314,
  title  = {Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl},
  author = {Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques and Victor Mijangos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04314},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, CLING 2018 Workshop on Linguistic Complexity and Natural Language Processing (LC&NLP)