Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03774v1
• Date: Thu, 7 May 2020 21:36:59 GMT
• Title: Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs
• Authors: Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell
• Abstract summary: This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages. We demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of -0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.
• Score: 73.10961848460613
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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