@inproceedings{saha-marchand-2025-empirical,
    title = "An Empirical Study of Language Syllabification using Syllabary and Lexical Networks",
    author = "Saha, Rusali  and
      Marchand, Yannick",
    editor = "Kuribayashi, Tatsuki  and
      Rambelli, Giulia  and
      Takmaz, Ece  and
      Wicke, Philipp  and
      Li, Jixing  and
      Oh, Byung-Doh",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cmcl-1.24/",
    pages = "197--206",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-227-5",
    abstract = "Language syllabification is the separation of a word into written or spoken syllables. The study of syllabification plays a pivotal role in morphology and there have been previous attempts to study this phenomenon using graphs or networks. Previous approaches have claimed through visual estimation that the degree distribution of language networks follows the Power Law distribution, however, there have not been any empirically grounded metrics to determine the same. In our study, we implement two kinds of language networks, namely, syllabary and lexical networks, and investigate the syllabification of four European languages: English, French, German and Spanish using network analysis and examine their small-world, random and scale-free nature. We additionally empirically prove that contrary to claims in previous works, although the degree distribution of these networks appear to follow a power law distribution, they are actually more in agreement with a log-normal distribution, when a numerically grounded curve-fitting is applied. Finally, we explore how syllabary and lexical networks for the English language change over time using a database of age-of-acquisition rating words. Our analysis further shows that the preferential attachment mechanism appears to be a well-grounded explanation for the degree distribution of the syllabary network."
}