Evaluating Inflectional Complexity Crosslinguistically: a Processing Perspective
Claudia Marzi, Marcello Ferro, Ouafae Nahli, Patrizia Belik, Stavros Bompolas, Vito Pirrelli · 2018
The paper provides a cognitively motivated method for evaluating the inflectional complexity of a language, based on a sample of "raw" inflected word forms processed and learned by a recurrent self-organising neural network with fixed parameter setting.Training items contain no information about either morphological content or structure.This makes the proposed method independent of both meta-linguistic issues (e.g.format and expressive power of descriptive rules, manual or automated segmentation of input forms, number of inflectional classes etc.) and language-specific typological aspects (e.g.word-based, stem-based or template-based morphology).Results are illustrated by contrasting Arabic, English, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish.