Work

On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems

Year: 2019

Type: article

Abstract: We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages’ morphological systems. We verify that there is a statistically significant empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: A language’s inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or highly irregular, but never both. We define a new measure of paradigm irregularity based on the conditional entropy of the surface realization of a paradigm— how hard it is to jointly predict all the word forms in a paradigm from the lemma. We estimate irregularity by training a predictive model. Our measurements are taken on large morphological paradigms from 36 typologically diverse languages.

Source: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00271

Authors: Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, Mans Hulden, Jason Eisner

Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado System, University of Colorado Denver

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: RI: Small: Linguistic Structure in Neural Sequence Models