POWER OF FREQUENCIES

Turkish is an agglutinating language with a non-rigid word order. When communicating, the word internal structure in Turkish is required to be segmented because Turkish morphosyntax is tortuous and it plays a central role in semantic analysis. Distinguishing a sub-word unit actually means performing a morph segmentation task, which is accomplished by children at an astonishing success rate. In this book, morph segmentation of Turkish words is demonstrated with a semi-supervised Hidden Markov Model, which emphasizes the power of frequencies and sequences as direct (or indirect negative) evidence for language acquisition. Human beings have a statistical learning ability and it is not specific to the faculty of language as claimed by nativists but to general cognition. This allows the plausible and valid use of computational and statistical models to analyze language. Such predictive models can allow a deeper understanding of the language.