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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2005.03774 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 May 2020]

Title:Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs

Authors:Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell
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Abstract:We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the international phonetic alphabet, and a statistical model trained on a sample of word types from the language, we can approximately measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language's phonotactics are. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept words across 106 languages, we demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of -0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.
Comments: Published in TACL: this https URL
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2005.03774 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2005.03774v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.03774
Journal reference: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 8, 1-18
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00296

Submission history

From: Tiago Pimentel [view email]
[v1] Thu, 7 May 2020 21:36:59 UTC (121 KB)
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