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Title: On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1718846
PAR ID:
10345022
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume:
7
ISSN:
2307-387X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
327 to 342
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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