June 19, 2020
The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often provide imperfect clues. Here, we investigate the strength of those clues. More specifically, we operationalize this by measuring how much information, in bits, we can glean about declension class from knowing the form and/or meaning of nouns. We know that form and meaning are often also indicative of grammatical gender---which, as we quantitatively verify, can itself share information with declension class---so we also control for gender. We find for two Indo-European languages (Czech and German) that form and meaning respectively share significant amounts of information with class (and contribute additional information above and beyond gender). The three-way interaction between class, form, and meaning (given gender) is also significant. Our study is important for two reasons: First, we introduce a new method that provides additional quantitative support for a classic linguistic finding that form and meaning are relevant for the classification of nouns into declensions. Secondly, we show not only that individual declensions classes vary in the strength of their clues within a language, but also that these variations themselves vary across languages.
Publisher
ACL
Research Topics
February 07, 2025
The Omnilingual MT Team, Pierre Andrews, Mikel Artetxe, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Joe Chuang, David Dale, Cynthia Gao, Jean Maillard, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Eduardo Sánchez, Yiannis Tsiamas, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol, Shireen Yates
February 07, 2025
February 07, 2025
Andros Tjandra, Yi-Chiao Wu, Baishan Guo, John Hoffman, Brian Ellis, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Sanyuan Chen, Matt Le, Nick Zacharov, Carleigh Wood, Ann Lee, Wei-Ning Hsu
February 07, 2025
February 06, 2025
Jarod Levy, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Svetlana Pinet, Jérémy Rapin, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jean Remi King
February 06, 2025
February 06, 2025
Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Jarod Levy, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Jérémy Rapin, F.-Xavier Alario, Pierre Bourdillon, Svetlana Pinet, Jean Remi King
February 06, 2025
Foundational models
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models