Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl

Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques, Victor Mijangos


Abstract
We use two small parallel corpora for comparing the morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. These are languages that belong to different linguistic families, the latter are low-resourced. We take into account two quantitative criteria, on one hand the distribution of types over tokens in a corpus, on the other, perplexity and entropy as indicators of word structure predictability. We show that a language can be complex in terms of how many different morphological word forms can produce, however, it may be less complex in terms of predictability of its internal structure of words.
Anthology ID:
W18-4604
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Complexity and Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New-Mexico
Editors:
Leonor Becerra-Bonache, M. Dolores Jiménez-López, Carlos Martín-Vide, Adrià Torrens-Urrutia
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4604
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques and Victor Mijangos. 2018. Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Complexity and Natural Language Processing, pages 30–37, Santa Fe, New-Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl (Gutierrez-Vasques & Mijangos, 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W18-4604.pdf