Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866908371250053120 |
|---|---|
| author | Torres, Charles J. Futrell, Richard |
| author_facet | Torres, Charles J. Futrell, Richard |
| contents | Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orthographic transparency in terms of the mutual compressibility between orthographic and phonological strings. Our measure provides a principled way to combine two factors that decrease orthographic transparency, capturing both irregular spellings and rule complexity in one quantity. We estimate our transparency measure using prequential code-lengths derived from neural sequence models. Evaluating 22 languages across a broad range of script types (alphabetic, abjad, abugida, syllabic, logographic) confirms common intuitions about relative transparency of scripts. Mutual compressibility offers a simple, principled, and general yardstick for orthographic transparency. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13657 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility Torres, Charles J. Futrell, Richard Computation and Language Information Theory Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orthographic transparency in terms of the mutual compressibility between orthographic and phonological strings. Our measure provides a principled way to combine two factors that decrease orthographic transparency, capturing both irregular spellings and rule complexity in one quantity. We estimate our transparency measure using prequential code-lengths derived from neural sequence models. Evaluating 22 languages across a broad range of script types (alphabetic, abjad, abugida, syllabic, logographic) confirms common intuitions about relative transparency of scripts. Mutual compressibility offers a simple, principled, and general yardstick for orthographic transparency. |
| title | Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility |
| topic | Computation and Language Information Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13657 |