A grammatical inference model for measuring language complexity

Abstract

The 21st century has re-opened the interest of Linguistics on the complexity of natural languages. The equi-complexity dogma –the idea that all languages must be equally complex– has been challenged by a number of researchers that claim that indeed natural languages differ in complexity. In the last fifteen years, challengers of the equi-complexity dogma have proposed many complexity measures that depend on their way of defining complexity. In this paper, we propose a grammatical inference model to measure the relative complexity of languages. The computational tool we introduce is the result of an interdisciplinary study inspired in the process of natural language acquisition.