Related papers: Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another, building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and Newmeyer,…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
Machine learning models allow us to compare languages by showing how hard a task in each language might be to learn and perform well on. Following this line of investigation, we explore what makes a language "hard to pronounce" by modelling…
This work presents a novel methodology for calculating the phonetic similarity between words taking motivation from the human perception of sounds. This metric is employed to learn a continuous vector embedding space that groups similar…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
The complexity of a system description is a function of the entropy of its symbolic description. Prior to computing the entropy of the system description, an observation scale has to be assumed. In natural language texts, typical scales are…
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
We consider the complexities of substitutive sequences over a binary alphabet. By studying various types of special words, we show that, knowing some initial values, its complexity can be completely formulated via a recurrence formula…
We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages' morphological systems. We verify that there is an empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: a language's inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or…
Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…
Spoken word recognition involves at least two basic computations. First is matching acoustic input to phonological categories (e.g. /b/, /p/, /d/). Second is activating words consistent with those phonological categories. Here we test the…
We present a cross-linguistic study that aims to quantify vowel harmony using data-driven computational modeling. Concretely, we define an information-theoretic measure of harmonicity based on the predictability of vowels in a natural…
We present a novel metric for the evaluation of the morphological plausibility of subword segmentation. Unlike the typically used morpheme boundary or retrieval F-score, which requires gold segmentation data that is either unavailable or of…
We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
Data complexity is an important concept in the natural sciences and related areas, but lacks a rigorous and computable definition. In this paper, we focus on a particular sense of complexity that is high if the data is structured in a way…
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…
Recent years have brought great advances into solving morphological tasks, mostly due to powerful neural models applied to various tasks as (re)inflection and analysis. Yet, such morphological tasks cannot be considered solved, especially…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…