12.990, Review: Comp Theory of Writing Systems (2nd review)

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-990. Mon Apr 9 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.990, Review: Comp Theory of Writing Systems (2nd review)

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1)
Date:  Mon, 9 Apr 2001 13:05:26 -0700 (PDT)
From:  Markus Walther <mwalther at STL.Research.Panasonic.COM>
Subject:  Review of Sproat, Computational Theory of Writing Systems

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 9 Apr 2001 13:05:26 -0700 (PDT)
From:  Markus Walther <mwalther at STL.Research.Panasonic.COM>
Subject:  Review of Sproat, Computational Theory of Writing Systems

Richard Sproat (2000): A Computational Theory of Writing
Systems.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK. [hardcover,$59.95]

Markus Walther, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory, Santa Barbara

SYNOPSIS
This is a remarkable book. Written by an author who has previously
shown with his 1992 classic, Morphology and Computation (MIT Press),
that he is well-versed in both linguistic detail and computational
matters, he strikes that rare balance once again with his newest work.
The book is to be understood against the author's extensive
background in developing text analysis components for text-to-speech
synthesis (TTS) at AT&T labs. What drives this book is the conviction
of the author that - starting from an orthographically represented
text - the problem of modelling the task of reading aloud within a TTS
system has a great deal to say for a model of the same task, as
performed by the human reader.

After a brief introduction to text-to-speech conversion to the uninitated,
chapter 1 ("Reading Devices") rather quickly proceeds to some formal
preliminaries and an axiomatic presentation of the core of Sproat's
theory, before the two central claims of his model of reading aloud are
formulated (p.16): REGULARITY - "The mapping from the Orthographic
Relevant Level (ORL) to the spelling level itself is a regular relation
(in the mathematical sense of formal language theory), and CONSISTENCY -
"The ORL for a given writing system (as used in a particular language)
represents a consistent level of linguistic representation." On p. 10 this
central concept of ORL is defined as the linguistic level where
correspondences between linguistic elements and their orthographic
expression are most succinctly stated. Sproat's exemplification here is
Russian, whose ORL he claims to be the morphological level, i.e. a level
where morphologically related forms are typically represented
consistently, abstracting away from phonological changes. A word like
<goroda> can be pronounced with initial stress to mean 'of a city' or with
final stress to denote 'cities' - but stress and its accompanying vowel
reductions are not marked, hence orthographical coverage of the
phonological level is incomplete. This deeper-than-surface-phonemic level
contrasts with neighbouring Belarussian, which does mark these reductions,
thus exhibiting a more 'shallow' ORL.

The aforementioned axioms that Sproat puts forward as a formal background
to his central claims essentially take up the temporal-intervals framework
that was pioneered by Bird and Klein (1990) for phonology. They specify
that - unless lexically overridden - immediately preceding elements on the
linguistic level will appear concatenated at the spelling level (English
/bo/ -> <bo>, but /ks/ -> <x> lexically), that in domination relationships
at the ORL it is the dominated element which will be spelled out by
default, and that for temporally overlapping linguistic elements the
spellout is the concatenation of the individual ORL-to-spelling mappings.
Sproat decomposes this overall mapping into a set of graphic encoding
rules and a set of autonomous spelling rules, both of which must be
regular under his first claim (p.18). His second claim is made more
precise by assuming a cascade of N levels of representation mediated by
classic rewrite rules - CONSISTENCY then amounts to picking the ORL from a
level i, 1 <= i <= N. (While Sproat leaves open the possibility of a
nonderivational, constraint-based recasting of these notions, he asserts
that some languages are most naturally modelled by referring to levels of
representation). The chapter concludes with terminology and conventions,
and presents a self-contained introduction to regular relations and their
corresponding computational devices, finite-state transducers (which
continue to rise in importance in contemporary computational linguistics).

Chapter 2 ("Regularity") defends the first claim in more detail. First, a
generalization from one-dimensional left-to-right concatenation to the two
dimensions of the plane is carried out, allowing formal description of
e.g. the subcomponents of Chinese characters with the help of planar
finite-state automata that can catenate components in leftward, rightward,
downward, upward and surrounding fashion. In that context, a third claim
of LOCALITY is made, namely that deviation from the text-inherent global
catenation direction (e.g. left-to-right) only occurs within a graphic
unit corresponding to a 'small linguistic unit' (e.g. the syllable in
Chinese). Further cases from Korean Hangul, Devanagari and Pahawh Hmong
scripts are treated, before an extensive set of placement rules for
Chinese character components is presented as a case study. Sproat is
honest enough not to leave out a counterexample from Ancient Egyptian,
where plural marking by orthographic word doubling is NOT mirrored in
linguistic reduplication (an ordinary suffix was used) - this in principle
problematic because arbitrary string copying is wellknown to be a
non-regular relation. However, the ensuing conclusion that his theory
predicts this as marked, hence rare, is incorrect insofar as no gradient
or probabilistic element is found in the theory, as required for rarity or
relative markedness.

Chapter 3 ("ORL Depth and Consistency") adresses the second claim by
taking up Russian and Belarusian in more detail, before presenting a most
interesting comparison of deep versus shallow ORL for English. Sproat
challenges the standard position held since Chomsky & Halle of a 'deep'
ORL by giving URs of 1,169 words chosen to map the territory where SPE
excelled - and showing that a 'shallow', surfacy alternative does
remarkably well under its own set of rewrite rules, which are fully
listed. Again, a counterexample is discussed: Serbo-Croatian appears
inconsistent to CONSISTENCY insofar as voicing assimilations show up in
the orthography, but /d/ before (ordinary & palatalized) /s/ retains
spelling <d>. Sproat conducts a phonetic pilot experiment with a native
speaker, which shows that in fact the orthography rather faithfully
reflects the observation that [-voice] assimilation is gradient and _least
complete_ precisely before the two fricatives, both confirming CONSISTENCY
and contradicting the traditional analysis.

Chapter 4 ("Linguistic Elements") investigates "the range of linguistic
elements than can be represented by written symbols in the world's writing
systems" (p.131). The author criticizes Gelb's, Sampson's and DeFrancis'
tree-based classification, devising his own two-dimensional chart with
dimensions 'Amount of Logography' (e.g. English < Japanese) and 'Type of
Phonography' (e.g. W.Semitic is Consonantal, English is Alphabetic,
Chinese is Syllabic). A case study of Chinese follows, where Sproat shows
that his axioms correctly predict a duplication of semantic radicals
across both components of a disyllabic morpheme, apparently the first
explanation of its kind. Of the further examples, I found reduplication
markers to be of particular interest. Khmer, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia
are among those who mark repetition of preceding material, the latter two
using a (sometimes raised) "2". Contrary to Sproat ("earlier forms", "was
used"), however, this definitely is a contemporary marking device: e.g.
searching for <orang2> 'person (pl.)' on Indonesian (.id) web pages alone
produces 242 hits, even showing recent forms like <foto2> as a byproduct.
This is of interest as it could present another potential counterexample
to REGULARITY, due to reduplicative copying. Sproat solves this by
assuming reduplicative morphemes to be already marked at the ORL level,
rendering mappings such as orang[_copy orang]_copy -> orang2 an easy task.
However, he does not discuss that the inverse mapping is problematic under
productivity: if a new word like <fax2> is read aloud for the first time,
native speakers will pronounce this ONLY as /faksfaks/, even though their
mental lexicon does not contain the word yet, countrary to Sproat's
reliance on a complete lexicon here.

Chapter 5 ("Psycholinguistic Evidence") proceeds to "see if there is any
support in the psycholinguistic literature for some properties of the
model" (p.163). He focuses on the predicted crosslinguistic sameness of
the nature of the relation between orthography and linguistic form, and
the prediction of a dual route, i.e. "an additional rule-based path to
pronunciation that bypasses the lexicon" (p.164). His review of the
literature finds these two to be well-supported, not withstanding some
connectionist counter-proposals that deny dual-route. He dissects one of
the latter - the Seidenberg-McClelland model of 1989 - and classifies it
as a "toy system" that is not tested on realistic data sets.

A final chapter 6 titled "Further Issues" looks into adaptation of writing
systems to a new language (Manx Gaelic is the example here), spelling
reforms (the case of the 1995 reform for Dutch), the relation between
written numerals and their fully spelled-out number names, the
orthographic encoding of abbreviations and the possibility that written
language is on a par with spoken language. Of these the discussion on
numerals was the most fascinating topic to the present reviewer, as Sproat
sets forth to devise a general strategy for first factorizing number
strings like 3684 into a factors-and-powers-of-ten representation, and
then mapping to the number words that exist in a given language. Unlike,
say, English, the case of present-day Malagasy is a hard one for Sproat,
though, because this language reverses the logical order, amounting to
"four and eight+ten and six+hundred and three thousand". Since only a
finite set of strings can be reversed (by sheer enumeration, i.e. at great
cost) under REGULARITY, he must assume a low-level processing step of
reading-direction reversal to handle arbitrarily long numbers in this
language (he does not cite experimental evidence to support this
prediction), though he has a point in saying that pre-19th century
Arabic-script writing in Malagasy would not have had that peculiarity.


CRITIQUE
While overall quality of this scholarly work is impressive, good pointers
to the literature are given throughout, and relevant discussion is nowhere
suppressed, a few points are nevertheless worthy of criticsm.

A general one is Sproat's employment of "soft" notions like
O(rthographically) R(elevant) L(evel), CONSISTENCY, S(mall) L(inguistic)
U(nit), which are not rigidly defined. Consider CONSISTENCY, where one has
to pick a level in a N-rule cascade as the ORL. Since URs themselves are
not strictly empirically derived, one can always explain away exceptions
to CONSISTENCY by lexical marking (as done e.g. on p.78f,89), making the
concept hard to falsify. Tightening up this concept and making it fully
empirical would probably require something like minimum-description-based
automatic learning of rules _and_ exception features, and/or replacement
of UR by phonetic SRs. Also, it is not clear to this reviewer why a
special type of planar automata had to be devised to cope with
two-dimensional character arrangements (p.40f) - could not the same task
be accomplished by a string-linearized _description_ of those
arrangements, thus using standard finite-state automata only? Note that
the planar automata as defined by Sproat need an additional interpretation
step anyway, since their output is also a description, not concrete pixels
on a page.

As in every book, there are also a few cases where the logic seems quirky,
e.g. when Sproat criticizes Wang's analysis of within-character placement
of components in Chinese. He dismisses Wang's featural decomposition of
placement as overly powerful because it allows a component to be placed
_inside_ another one, whereas according to Sproat such placement only
occurs in fossilized forms. But traditional logic in the field would
rather cite this as support that Wang is on the right track, since there
_was_ apparently a stage in the language where this could happen. Since
Sproat's theory is essentially possibilistic rather than probabilistic,
ruling out cases on appeal to markedness/infrequency/nonproductivity seems
a bit odd.

Also, the fact that several instances of potential crosslinguistic
violations of REGULARITY (recall in particular the reduplication cases -
also, what about balanced French/German-type quotes-in-quotes-quotes...
akin to the non-regular a^n b^n?) had to be explained away by appeal to
different devices. This makes the present reviewer wonder whether not in
fact the "true" state-of-affairs might be better described by some mildly
non-regular formal language framework that is somehow probabilistically
weighted to reflect the prevailing regular cases, notwithstanding the
undisputed utility of the finite-state paradigm in natural language
engineering.

Speaking of the few outright errors and omissions, appendix A of ch.3
comparing deep and shallow ORL for English appears noteworthy. A feature
[+db] is introduced with no rules referring to it. As a consequence, e.g.
the claimed mapping of the ORL for 'allophone' to its orthographic
representation is not derivable (p.99), with the only rule for translating
/l/ being # 30: l -> <l> (p.129). This is unfortunate in the light of the
claim (p.85) that rules have been tested against ORL-spelling pairs (fn.20
specifically advertises AT&T's FSM software as the one used for concrete
testing). Similarly, no rule refers to secondary stress, yet it is
included in both ORLs. Also, no rule for '+' (morph.boundary) could be
found despite rhythmic+s,spheric+s,vertic+es, one apparently would need to
add iz -> <es> / + _ #. Then there are undiscussed rule types like dZ ->
<g> / _ (<i> | <e> | <y>) (p.130) - which - by referencing the output
level in their right context - could be interpreted as two-level rules in
the sense of Koskenniemi (1983). Independently, this reference to output
would be the only way words like ORL 'dZin -> ORTH <gene> (p.109) could be
derived, where the vowel /i/ has no lexical marking _<i> in Sproat's
listing. This important detail clearly should have been mentioned
(two-level rules are mentioned only for non-crucial orderings, p.69,
fn.2., and no notational conventions are given for them).

But, overall, the book has much to recommend it for, and should be seen as
an important contribution to the modern study of crosslinguistic writing
systems for some years to come.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bird, S. & Klein, E. (1990): Phonological events. Journal of
  Linguistics 26, 33-56.

Koskenniemi, K. (1983): Two-Level Morphology: A General
 Computational Model for Word-Form Recognition and Production. University
 of Helsinki.

Sproat, R. (1992): Morphology and Computation. MIT Press.

BIOGRAPHY
Markus Walther received his Ph.D. in computational linguistics in 1997
from the university of Duesseldorf, Germany. His thesis work concentrated
on a constraint-based computational model of prosodic morphology,
developing a formally sound a-templatic theory of non-concatenative
morphology. Postdoc research at the University of Marburg, Germany,
thereafter has broadened that interest to other phenomena, in particular
reduplication and truncation (see www.markus-walther.de). Recently, Markus
Walther has started to work on text-to-speech systems at the Panasonic
Speech Tech Lab, Santa Barbara, California.



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