@inproceedings{pimentel-etal-2019-rethinking,
    title = "Rethinking Phonotactic Complexity",
    author = "Pimentel, Tiago  and
      Roark, Brian  and
      Cotterell, Ryan",
    editor = "Axelrod, Amittai  and
      Yang, Diyi  and
      Cunha, Rossana  and
      Shaikh, Samira  and
      Waseem, Zeerak",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W19-3628/",
    pages = "88--90",
    abstract = "In this work, we propose the use of phone-level language models to estimate phonotactic complexity{---}measured in bits per phoneme{---}which makes cross-linguistic comparison straightforward. We compare the entropy across languages using this simple measure, gaining insight on how complex different language{'}s phonotactics are. Finally, we show a very strong negative correlation between phonotactic complexity and the average length of words{---}Spearman rho=-0.744{---}when analysing a collection of 106 languages with 1016 basic concepts each."
}