@InProceedings{bentz-berdicevskis:2016:CL4LC,
  author    = {Bentz, Christian  and  Berdicevskis, Aleksandrs},
  title     = {Learning pressures reduce morphological complexity: Linking corpus, computational and experimental evidence},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {222--232},
  abstract  = {The morphological complexity of languages differs widely and changes over time.
	Pathways of change are often driven by the interplay of multiple competing
	factors, and are hard to disentangle. We here focus on a paradigmatic scenario
	of language change: the reduction of morphological complexity from Latin
	towards the Romance languages. To establish a causal explanation for this
	phenomenon, we employ three lines of evidence: 1) analyses of parallel corpora
	to measure the complexity of words in actual language production, 2)
	applications of NLP tools to further tease apart the contribution of
	inflectional morphology to word complexity, and 3) experimental data from
	artificial language learning, which illustrate the learning pressures at play
	when morphology simplifies. These three lines of evidence converge to show that
	pressures associated with imperfect language learning are good candidates to
	causally explain the reduction in morphological complexity in the
	Latin-to-Romance scenario. More generally, we argue that combining corpus,
	computational and experimental evidence is the way forward in historical
	linguistics and linguistic typology.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-4125}
}