{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,12]],"date-time":"2025-10-12T03:53:42Z","timestamp":1760241222862,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":39,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,30]],"date-time":"2019-12-30T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1577664000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship","award":["--"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["--"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100013704","name":"CONACYT","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["--"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["--"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100013704","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>We propose a quantitative approach for quantifying morphological complexity of a language based on text. Several corpus-based methods have focused on measuring the different word forms that a language can produce. We take into account not only the productivity of morphological processes but also the predictability of those morphological processes. We use a language model that predicts the probability of sub-word sequences within a word; we calculate the entropy rate of this model and use it as a measure of predictability of the internal structure of words. Our results show that it is important to integrate these two dimensions when measuring morphological complexity, since languages can be complex under one measure but simpler under another one. We calculated the complexity measures in two different parallel corpora for a typologically diverse set of languages. Our approach is corpus-based and it does not require the use of linguistic annotated data.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e22010048","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,30]],"date-time":"2019-12-30T05:49:41Z","timestamp":1577684981000},"page":"48","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Productivity and Predictability for Measuring Morphological Complexity"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"22","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1486-2774","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ximena","family":"Gutierrez-Vasques","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Language and Space Lab, URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Victor","family":"Mijangos","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Philological Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sampson, G., Gil, D., and Trudgill, P. (2009). Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable, Oxford University Press.","DOI":"10.1093\/oso\/9780199545216.001.0001"},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"Meinhardt, E., Malouf, R., and Ackerman, F. (2017). Morphology Gets More and More Enumeratively Complex, Unless It Doesn\u2019t, LSA Summer Institute."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Miestamo, M., Sinnem\u00e4ki, K., and Karlsson, F. (2008). Grammatical complexity in a cross-linguistic perspective. Lang. Complexity Typol. Contact Chang., 23\u201341.","DOI":"10.1075\/slcs.94.04mie"},{"key":"ref_4","unstructured":"Simon, H.A. (1996). The Architecture of Complexity, MIT Press."},{"key":"ref_5","unstructured":"Sinnem\u00e4ki, K. (2011). Language Universals and Linguistic Complexity: Three Case Studies in Core Argument Marking, University of Helsinki."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Baerman, M., Brown, D., and Corbett, G.G. (2015). Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity, Oxford University Press.","DOI":"10.1093\/acprof:oso\/9780198723769.001.0001"},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"Haspelmath, M., and Sims, A.D. (2010). Understanding Morphology, Hodder Education."},{"key":"ref_8","first-page":"171","article-title":"Stem spaces and predictability in verbal inflection","volume":"12","author":"Montermini","year":"2013","journal-title":"Lingue e Linguaggio"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"429","DOI":"10.1353\/lan.2013.0054","article-title":"Morphological organization: The low conditional entropy conjecture","volume":"89","author":"Ackerman","year":"2013","journal-title":"Language"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"327","DOI":"10.1162\/tacl_a_00271","article-title":"On the complexity and typology of inflectional morphological systems","volume":"7","author":"Cotterell","year":"2019","journal-title":"Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist."},{"key":"ref_11","unstructured":"Bentz, C., Ruzsics, T., Koplenig, A., and Samardzic, T. (2016, January 11). A comparison between morphological complexity measures: Typological data vs. language corpora. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (cl4lc), Osaka, Japan."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"355","DOI":"10.2298\/PSI1304355B","article-title":"The information-theoretic turn","volume":"46","author":"Blevins","year":"2013","journal-title":"Psihologija"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"156","DOI":"10.3366\/word.2016.0092","article-title":"Joint predictiveness in inflectional paradigms","volume":"9","author":"Bonami","year":"2016","journal-title":"Word Struct."},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"223","DOI":"10.1080\/09296174.2014.911506","article-title":"Can type-token ratio be used to show morphological complexity of languages?","volume":"21","author":"Kettunen","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Quant. Linguist."},{"key":"ref_15","first-page":"40","article-title":"Creating a massively parallel bible corpus","volume":"135","author":"Mayer","year":"2014","journal-title":"Oceania"},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"Dryer, M.S., and Haspelmath, M. (2019, December 08). The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Available online: https:\/\/wals.info\/."},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"Agi\u0107, \u017d., and Vuli\u0107, I. (August, January 28). JW300: A wide-coverage parallel corpus for low-resource languages. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguist, Florence, Italy."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bybee, J. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition, Cambridge University Press.","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511750526"},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"94","DOI":"10.1080\/09296171003643098","article-title":"Cutting the Gordian knot: The moving-average type\u2013token ratio (MATTR)","volume":"17","author":"Covington","year":"2010","journal-title":"J. Quant. Linguist."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"323","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1001749303137","article-title":"How variable may a constant be? Measures of lexical richness in perspective","volume":"32","author":"Tweedie","year":"1998","journal-title":"Comput. Humanit."},{"key":"ref_21","first-page":"1","article-title":"The type-token relationship in Slavic parallel texts","volume":"20","author":"Kelih","year":"2010","journal-title":"Glottometrics"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mayer, T., W\u00e4lchli, B., Rohrdantz, C., and Hund, M. (2014). From the extraction of continuous features in parallel texts to visual analytics of heterogeneous areal-typological datasets. Lang. Process. Grammars. Role Funct. Oriented Comput. Model., 13\u201338.","DOI":"10.1075\/slcs.150.02may"},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gerz, D., Vuli\u0107, I., Ponti, E.M., Reichart, R., and Korhonen, A. (November, January 31). On the relation between linguistic typology and (limitations of) multilingual language modeling. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Brussels, Belgium.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D18-1029"},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"467","DOI":"10.1353\/lan.2012.0065","article-title":"Paradigmatic chaos in Nuer","volume":"88","author":"Baerman","year":"2012","journal-title":"Language"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Smit, P., Virpioja, S., Gr\u00f6nroos, S.A., and Kurimo, M. (2014, January 26\u201330). Morfessor 2.0: Toolkit for statistical morphological segmentation. Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Gothenburg, Sweden.","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/E14-2006"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., and Birch, A. (2015). Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P16-1162"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"230","DOI":"10.1075\/ml.18010.baa","article-title":"Inflectional morphology with linear mappings","volume":"13","author":"Baayen","year":"2018","journal-title":"Ment. Lex."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Vania, C., and Lopez, A. (2017). From characters to words to in between: Do we capture morphology?. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-1184"},{"key":"ref_29","first-page":"1137","article-title":"A neural probabilistic language model","volume":"3","author":"Bengio","year":"2003","journal-title":"J. Mach. Learn. Res."},{"key":"ref_30","unstructured":"Cover, T.M., and Thomas, J.A. (2012). Elements of Information Theory, John Wiley & Sons."},{"key":"ref_31","unstructured":"Freedman, A. (2017). Convergence Theorem for Finite Markov Chains. Proc. REU, Available online: http:\/\/math.uchicago.edu\/~may\/REU2017\/REUPapers\/Freedman.pdf."},{"key":"ref_32","first-page":"5","article-title":"Towards Burmese (Myanmar) Morphological Analysis: Syllable-based Tokenization and Part-of-speech Tagging","volume":"19","author":"Ding","year":"2019","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process. (TALLIP)"},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"441","DOI":"10.2307\/1422689","article-title":"The proof and measurement of association between two things","volume":"100","author":"Spearman","year":"1987","journal-title":"Am. J. Psychol."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cotterell, R., Mielke, S.J., Eisner, J., and Roark, B. (2018). Are all languages equally hard to language-model?. arXiv.","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/N18-2085"},{"key":"ref_35","first-page":"112","article-title":"A Rich Morphological Tagger for English: Exploring the Cross-Linguistic Tradeoff Between Morphology and Syntax","volume":"Volume 2","author":"Kirov","year":"2017","journal-title":"Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics"},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Blevins, J.P., Milin, P., and Ramscar, M. (2017). The Zipfian paradigm cell filling problem. Perspectives on Morphological Organization, Brill.","DOI":"10.1163\/9789004342934_008"},{"key":"ref_37","first-page":"45","article-title":"On suppletion","volume":"14","year":"1976","journal-title":"Linguistics"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"742","DOI":"10.2307\/416885","article-title":"False Starts and Filler Syllables: Ways to Learn Grammatical Morphemes","volume":"69","author":"Peters","year":"1993","journal-title":"Language"},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"eaaw2594","DOI":"10.1126\/sciadv.aaw2594","article-title":"Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche","volume":"5","author":"Oh","year":"2019","journal-title":"Sci. Adv."}],"container-title":["Entropy"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/22\/1\/48\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T13:46:41Z","timestamp":1760190401000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1099-4300\/22\/1\/48"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,30]]},"references-count":39,"journal-issue":{"issue":"1","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,1]]}},"alternative-id":["e22010048"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/e22010048","relation":{},"ISSN":["1099-4300"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1099-4300"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,12,30]]}}}