Computational complexity of abstractive morphology
Vito Pirrelli, Marcello Ferro, Claudia Marzi · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
Blevins’ distinction between abstractive and constructive approaches to word structure has proved to be of general theoretical interest, taking stock of considerably different descriptive statements and implications at the level of grammar architecture. This chapter intends to show that the two views are also computationally different and that such a difference in complexity is rooted in the way word competence is conceptualized: as a static repository of morphological primitives and rules for their (dis)assembly in the constructive view; as one dynamic set of relations among fully inflected forms in the abstractive view. Criticisms traditionally levelled at connectionist architectures for morphology acquisition are reappraised in this perspective, to argue that a number of computational liabilities of multi‐layered perceptrons are effectively addressed by a neutrally inspired implementation of the lexicon as a dynamical system, resting on the key notions of self-organization, competition, and emergence.