Abstract
This paper proposes a metric to quantify lexical complexity in Malayalam. The met- ric utilizes word frequency, orthography and morphology as the three factors affect- ing visual word recognition in Malayalam. Malayalam differs from other Indian lan- guages due to its agglutinative morphology and orthography, which are incorporated into our model. The predictions made by our model are then evaluated against reac- tion times in a lexical decision task. We find that reaction times are predicted by frequency, morphological complexity and script complexity. We also explore the interactions between morphological com- plexity with frequency and script in our results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on lexical complexity in Malayalam.- Anthology ID:
- 2019.icon-1.21
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
- Editors:
- Dipti Misra Sharma, Pushpak Bhattacharya
- Venue:
- ICON
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- NLP Association of India
- Note:
- Pages:
- 178–183
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2019.icon-1.21
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Richard Shallam and Ashwini Vaidya. 2019. Towards measuring lexical complexity in Malayalam. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 178–183, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. NLP Association of India.
- Cite (Informal):
- Towards measuring lexical complexity in Malayalam (Shallam & Vaidya, ICON 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/2019.icon-1.21.pdf