# Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04314/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05365/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We use two small parallel corpora for comparing the morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. These are languages that belong to different linguistic families, the latter are low-resourced. We take into account two quantitative criteria, on one hand the distribution of types over tokens in a corpus, on the other, perplexity and entropy as indicators of word structure predictability. We show that a language can be complex in terms of how many different morphological word forms can produce, however, it may be less complex in terms of predictability of its internal structure of words.