Complexity of European Union Languages: A comparative approach*

Abstract

In this article, we are studying the differences between the European Union languages using statistical and unsupervised methods. The analysis is conducted in the different levels of language: the lexical, morphological and syntactic. Our premise is that the difficulty of the translation could be perceived as differences or similarities in different levels of language. The results are compared to linguistic groupings. Two approaches are selected for the analysis. A Kolmogorov complexity-based approach is used to compare the language structure in syntactic and morphological levels. A morpheme-level comparison is conducted based on an automated segmentation of the languages into morpheme-like units. The way the languages convey information in these levels is taken as a measure of similarity or dissimilarity between languages and the results are compared to classical linguistic classifications. The results have a significant impact on the design of (statistical) machine translation systems. If the source language conveys information in the morphological level and the target language in the syntactic level, it is clear that the machine translation system must be able to transfer the information from one level to another.