mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems

arXiv 1807.02747 ↗First posted 8 Jul 2018cs.CLcited by 15

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Abstract (arXiv)

We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages' morphological systems. We verify that there is an empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: a language's inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or highly irregular, but never both. Our methodology measures paradigm irregularity as the entropy of the surface realization of a paradigm -- how hard it is to jointly predict all the surface forms of a paradigm. We estimate this by a variational approximation. Our measurements are taken on large morphological paradigms from 31 typologically diverse languages.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 4; 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 1; 2026: 3.

15 papers.

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  1. 2022What do tokens know about their characters and how do they know it?cited by 36
  2. 2021A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languagescited by 22
  3. 2024Evaluating Morphological Compositional Generalization in Large Language Modelscited by 16
  4. 2022Estimating the Entropy of Linguistic Distributionscited by 11
  5. 2022Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinshipcited by 9
  6. 2021A Massively Multilingual Analysis of Cross-linguality in Shared Embedding Spacecited by 8
  7. 2022What do complexity measures measure? Correlating and validating corpus-based measures of morphological complexitycited by 8
  8. 2021Modeling the Unigram Distributioncited by 7
  9. 2023Colexifications for Bootstrapping Cross-lingual Datasets: The Case of Phonology, Concreteness, and Affectivenesscited by 2
  10. 2024The natural stability of autonomous morphologycited by 1
  11. 2025Complexity counts: global and local perspectives on Indo-Aryan numeral systemscited by 1
  12. 2026Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across Languages Supports Efficient Communicationcited by 1
3 more
  1. 2026Assessing the Impact of Typological Features on Multilingual Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Modelscited by 1
  2. 2024Patterns of Persistence and Diffusibility across the World's Languagescited by 0
  3. 2026Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patternscited by 0