%0 Generic %B Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology %D 2011 %T Non-canonical inflection : data, formalisation and complexity measures. %A Benoît Sagot %A Géraldine Walther %K Canonicity %K Description Complexity %K Inflection Pat- tern %K Inflection Zone %K Inflectional Morphology %K MDL %K Paradigm Shape %K Stem Pattern. %K Stem Zone %X

 

Non-canonical inflection (suppletion, deponency, heterocli- sis...) is extensively studied in theoretical approaches to morphology. However, these studies often lack practical implementations associated with large-scale lexica. Yet these are precisely the requirements for ob- jective comparative studies on the complexity of morphological descrip- tions. We show how a model of inflectional morphology which can rep- resent many non-canonical phenomena [67], as well as a formalisation and an implementation thereof can be used to evaluate the complexity of competing morphological descriptions. After illustrating the proper- ties of the model with data about French, Latin, Italian, Persian and Sorani Kurdish verbs and about noun classes from Croatian and Slovak we expose experiments conducted on the complexity of four competing descriptions of French verbal inflection. The complexity is evaluated us- ing the information-theoretic concept of description length. We show that the new concepts introduced in the model by [67] enable reducing the complexity of morphological descriptions w.r.t. both traditional or more recent models.