# On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 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.