Towards a bottom-up approach to phonological typology
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The set of combinatoric possibilities of even simple formal systems explodes quickly. Adopting (perhaps overly) simple assumptions about phonological representation and computation, we show that, with just a handful of featural primitives, the number of possible segments, the number of possible inventories and the number of possible rule targets quickly reaches shockingly high levels. Not only is this result inevitable for pretty much any feature system, but it is also desirable. The crucial point is to define sets (of segments, inventories, or rule targets) intensionally, and see that we can account for a vast range of phenomena using a minimal toolkit, in parallel to recent evo-devo work in biology. Understanding the combinatorics is a step towards a biolinguistic approach to phonology.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.026 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it