Investigating phonological theories with crowd-sourced data: The Inventory Size Hypothesis in the light of Lingua Libre
Data-driven research in phonetics and phonology relies massively on oral resources, and access thereto. We propose to explore a question in comparative linguistics using an open-source crowd-sourced corpus, Lingua Libre, Wikimedia’s participatory linguistic library, to show that such corpora may offer a solution to typologists wishing to explore numerous languages at once. For the present proof of concept, we compare the realizations of Italian and Spanish vowels (sample size = 5000) to investigate whether vowel production is influenced by the size of the phonemic inventory (the Inventory Size Hypothesis), by the exact shape of the inventory (the Vowel Quality Hypothesis) or by none of the above. Results show that the size of the inventory does not seem to influence vowel production, thus supporting previous research, but also that the shape of the inventory may well be a factor determining the extent of variation in vowel production. Most of all, these results show that Lingua Libre has the potential to provide valuable data for linguistic inquiry.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Morphological parsing of Swahili using crowdsourced lexical resources
We describe a morphological analyzer for the Swahili language, written in an extension of XFST/LEXC intended for the easy declaration of morphophonological patterns and importation of lexical resources. Our analyzer was …
Machine TranslationTabMCQ: A Dataset of General Knowledge Tables and Multiple-choice Questions
We describe two new related resources that facilitate modelling of general knowledge reasoning in 4th grade science exams. The first is a collection of curated facts in the form of tables, and the second is a large set o…
General KnowledgeMultiple-choiceQuestion AnsweringLearning Possibilistic Logic Theories from Default Rules
We introduce a setting for learning possibilistic logic theories from defaults of the form "if alpha then typically beta". We first analyse this problem from the point of view of machine learning theory, determining the …
Learning TheoryBabyLM's First Words: Word Segmentation as a Phonological Probing Task
Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond Englis…
Rethinking Machine Ethics -- Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?
Making moral judgments is an essential step toward developing ethical AI systems. Prevalent approaches are mostly implemented in a bottom-up manner, which uses a large set of annotated data to train models based on crowd…
Ethics