Abstract
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity—bits per phoneme— that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the international phonetic alphabet, and a statistical model trained on a sample of word types from the language, we can approximately measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language’s phonotactics is. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept words across 106 languages, we demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of − 0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.tacl-1.1
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8
- Month:
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–18
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.tacl-1.1
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00296
- Cite (ACL):
- Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, and Ryan Cotterell. 2020. Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8:1–18.
- Cite (Informal):
- Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs (Pimentel et al., TACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.tacl-1.1.pdf
- Code
- tpimentelms/phonotactic-complexity