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Kolmogorov complexity of morphs and constructions in English

Summary

The paper contributes to the debate on linguistic complexity: whether all languages are equally complex and how that complexity should be measured. The author builds on Juola's method, which estimates text complexity through compression, and proposes a variant of it called "targeted manipulation." Kolmogorov complexity is approximated with the gzip archiver. To measure morphological or syntactic complexity, the text is deliberately distorted by random deletions before compression. The compression of the original texts is then compared with that of texts in which particular grammatical devices have been altered. In this way the contribution of ten features of English is estimated: morphs (–ing, –ed, the genitive 's, plural –s, 3rd person –s) and constructions (progressive, perfect, passive, will, going to). The corpus covers three genres. It turned out that a larger number of marker types increases morphological complexity but decreases syntactic complexity, because markers make textual patterns more predictable. The results agree with traditional qualitative complexity metrics. Thus, information-theoretic methods yield linguistically meaningful answers even for individual grammatical phenomena.

Key points

  • The corpus contains 42,026 words in three roughly equal parts of ~14 thousand words each: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (fiction), the Gospel of Mark, English Standard Version translation (religious text), and the author's own newspaper Euro-Congo corpus (articles collected from December 2011 to February 2012).
  • Complexity is approximated using gzip (a compressor of the Lempel-Ziv family). For morphological distortion, 10% of the characters of the text are randomly deleted; for syntactic distortion, 10% of the elements are likewise deleted. Differences between text versions were tested with the Tukey HSD test.
  • The progressive, perfect, and passive constructions increase both morphological and syntactic complexity. The future markers will and going to are an exception, so analytic invariant markers proved simpler than inflectional morphosyntactic patterns.
  • The complexity of features is largely independent of their frequency in the corpus. However, going to occurs only 13 times, and this case shows that the method performs poorly for rare phenomena.
  • Among the limitations, the author names two. The method does not take into account the relation between form and meaning. In addition, it depends on written text and orthographic conventions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Morphology

 Institutions

🎓University of FreiburgFreiburg im Breisgau · Germany3 works · 851 citations

Cite

Cite as Katharina Ehret. 2014. Kolmogorov complexity of morphs and constructions in English. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{ehret2014kolmogorov,
  title = {{Kolmogorov complexity of morphs and constructions in English}},
  author = {Katharina Ehret},
  booktitle = {Linguistic Issues in Language Technology},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.33011/lilt.v11i.1363},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33011/lilt.v11i.1363}
}

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