<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="pimentel-etal-2020-phonotactic">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Tiago</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Pimentel</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Brian</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Roark</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Ryan</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Cotterell</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2020</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <genre authority="bibutilsgt">journal article</genre>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <originInfo>
            <issuance>continuing</issuance>
            <publisher>MIT Press</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Cambridge, MA</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">periodical</genre>
        <genre authority="bibutilsgt">academic journal</genre>
    </relatedItem>
    <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 \ensuremath- 0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">pimentel-etal-2020-phonotactic</identifier>
    <identifier type="doi">10.1162/tacl_a_00296</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2020.tacl-1.1/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2020</date>
        <detail type="volume"><number>8</number></detail>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>1</start>
            <end>18</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%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 \ensuremath- 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.