Perplexity of bi-phone phonotactic models in Korean loanword phonology
Hahn Koo · 2010
The paper presents a corpus study which shows that the probability distribution of bi-phones in a lexicon of Korean loanwords is significantly different from that in a typical Korean lexicon or a lexicon consisting solely of native Korean and Sino-Korean words. This is demonstrated by comparing the perplexity of two types of bi-phone phonotactic models: a model trained on a set of Korean loanwords and a model trained on a “general ” Korean lexicon. The study has implications for computational phonology in that the results suggest that the performance of a statistical model of loanword phonology whose prior is estimated from a lexicon not specialized for loanwords may not be suitable for predicting the adapted forms in the recipient language.