{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/phonotactic-complexity-and-its-trade-offs","title":"Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs","arxiv_id":"2005.03774","date":"2020-05-07","proceeding":"TACL 2020 1","authors":["Tiago Pimentel","Brian Roark","Ryan Cotterell"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03774v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.03774v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"phonotactic-complexity-and-its-trade-offs","repo_url":"https://github.com/tpimentelms/phonotactic-complexity","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2005.03774","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}