Abstract
We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages’ morphological systems. We verify that there is a statistically significant empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: A language’s inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or highly irregular, but never both. We define a new measure of paradigm irregularity based on the conditional entropy of the surface realization of a paradigm— how hard it is to jointly predict all the word forms in a paradigm from the lemma. We estimate irregularity by training a predictive model. Our measurements are taken on large morphological paradigms from 36 typologically diverse languages.- Anthology ID:
- Q19-1021
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7
- Month:
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 327–342
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1021
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00271
- Cite (ACL):
- Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, Mans Hulden, and Jason Eisner. 2019. On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7:327–342.
- Cite (Informal):
- On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems (Cotterell et al., TACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/Q19-1021.pdf