Phonotactic Structures in Swedish : A Data-Driven Approach

Abstract: Ever since Bengt Sigurd laid out the first comprehensive description of Swedish phonotactics in 1965, it has been the main point of reference within the field. This thesis attempts a new approach, by presenting a computational and statistical model of Swedish phonotactics, which can be built by any corpus of IPA phonetic script. The model is a weighted trie, represented as a finite state automaton, where states are phonemes linked by transitions in valid phoneme sequences, which adds the benefits of being probabilistic and expressible by regular languages. It was implemented using the Nordisk Språkteknologi (NST) pronunciation lexicon and was used to test against a couple of rulesets defined in Sigurd relating to initial two consonant clusters of phonemes and phoneme classes. The results largely agree with Sigurd's rules and illustrated the benefits of the model, in that it effectively can be used to pattern match against phonotactic information using regular expression-like syntax.