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        <title>Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs</title>
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        <namePart type="given">Tiago</namePart>
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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 is. 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.</abstract>
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    <identifier type="doi">10.1162/tacl_a_00296</identifier>
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    <part>
        <date>2020</date>
        <detail type="volume"><number>8</number></detail>
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%0 Journal Article
%T Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs
%A Pimentel, Tiago
%A Roark, Brian
%A Cotterell, Ryan
%J Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
%D 2020
%V 8
%I MIT Press
%C Cambridge, MA
%F pimentel-etal-2020-phonotactic
%X 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 is. 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.
%R 10.1162/tacl_a_00296
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.tacl-1.1
%U https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00296
%P 1-18

Markdown (Informal)

[Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs](https://aclanthology.org/2020.tacl-1.1) (Pimentel et al., TACL 2020)

• Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs (Pimentel et al., TACL 2020)

ACL

• Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, and Ryan Cotterell. 2020. Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 8:1–18.