Modeling the Structure and Dynamics of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 601–608 Manchester, August 2008 Modeling the Structure and Dynamics of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach Animesh Mukherjee1, Monojit Choudhury2, Anupam Basu1, Niloy Ganguly1 1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India – 721302 2Microsoft Research India, Bangalore, India – 560080 {animeshm,anupam,niloy}@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in, monojitc@microsoft.com Abstract We study the self-organization of the con- sonant inventories through a complex net- work approach. We observe that the dis- tribution of occurrence as well as co- occurrence of the consonants across lan- guages follow a power-law behavior. The co-occurrence network of consonants ex- hibits a high clustering coefficient. We propose four novel synthesis models for these networks (each of which is a refine- ment 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 inven- tories. We conclude by arguing that a pos- sible interpretation of this mechanism of network growth is the process of child lan- guage acquisition. Such models essentially increase our understanding of the struc- ture of languages that is influenced by their evolutionary dynamics and this, in turn, can be extremely useful for building future NLP applications. 1 Introduction A large number of regular patterns are observed across the sound inventories of human languages. These regularities are arguably a consequence of the self-organization that is instrumental in the emergence of these inventories (de Boer, 2000). Many attempts have been made by functional pho- nologists for explaining this self-organizing behav- c⃝ 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported li- cense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Some rights reserved. ior through certain general principles such as max- imal perceptual contrast (Liljencrants and Lind- blom, 1972), ease of articulation (Lindblom and Maddieson, 1988; de Boer, 2000), and ease of learnability (de Boer, 2000). In fact, there are a lot of studies that attempt to explain the emergence of the vowel inventories through the application of one or more of the above principles (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; de Boer, 2000). Some studies have also been carried out in the area of linguistics that seek to reason the observed patterns in the con- sonant inventories (Trubetzkoy, 1939; Lindblom and Maddieson, 1988; Boersma, 1998; Clements, 2008). Nevertheless, most of these works are con- fined to certain individual principles rather than formulating a general theory describing the emer- gence of these regular patterns across the conso- nant inventories. The self-organization of the consonant inven- tories emerges due to an interaction of different forces acting upon them. In order to identify the nature of these interactions one has to understand the growth dynamics of these inventories. The the- ories of complex networks provide a number of growth models that have proved to be extremely successful in explaining the evolutionary dynam- ics of various social (Newman, 2001; Ramasco et al., 2004), biological (Jeong et al., 2000) and other natural systems. The basic framework …

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