Modeling the structure and dynamics of the consonant inventories: a complex network approach

Authors:
Animesh Mukherjee;Monojit Choudhury;Anupam Basu;Niloy Ganguly
Affiliations:
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India;Microsoft Research India, Bangalore, India;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
Venue:
COLING '08 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics - Volume 1
Year:
2008

Citing 1
Cited 1

Analysis and synthesis of the distribution of consonants over languages: a complex network approach

COLING-ACL '06 Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Main conference poster sessions

Discovering global patterns in linguistic networks through spectral analysis: a case study of the consonant inventories

EACL '09 Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Abstract

We study the self-organization of the consonant inventories through a complex network approach. We observe that the distribution of occurrence as well as co-occurrence of the consonants across languages follow a power-law behavior. The co-occurrence network of consonants exhibits a high clustering coefficient. We propose four novel synthesis models for these networks (each of which is a refinement of the earlier) so as to successively match with higher accuracy (a) the above mentioned topological properties as well as (b) the linguistic property of feature economy exhibited by the consonant inventories. We conclude by arguing that a possible interpretation of this mechanism of network growth is the process of child language acquisition. Such models essentially increase our understanding of the structure of languages that is influenced by their evolutionary dynamics and this, in turn, can be extremely useful for building future NLP applications.