On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems

Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, Mans Hulden, Jason Eisner

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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
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
327–342
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1021
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00271
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/Q19-1021.pdf
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