---
title: "Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model? — paper by Cotterell et al. (2018)"
description: "The authors propose a controlled setup. 19 references, cited by 67 papers here."
authors: ["Ryan Cotterell", "Sabrina J. Mielke", "Jason Eisner", "Brian Roark"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N18-2085/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/n18-2085"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cotterell-2018-are-all-languages-equally-hard/"
---
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# Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model?

**Authors:** [Ryan Cotterell](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ryan-cotterell/), [Sabrina J. Mielke](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sabrina-j-mielke/), [Jason Eisner](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jason-eisner/) and [Brian Roark](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/brian-roark/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/) ([NAACL 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N18-2085/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N18-2085.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/n18-2085](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n18-2085) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2803214681)

**Citations:** 80 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [67](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cotterell-2018-are-all-languages-equally-hard/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Multilingual NLP often assumes one modeling technique works equally well for every language. Comparing language models across languages is hard, though, because corpus sizes, topics, spelling conventions and OOV handling all differ.

The authors propose a controlled setup. Open-vocabulary models are trained and tested on utterance-aligned translations from Europarl in 21 languages, so every model must encode roughly the same content. Performance is measured in bits per English character (BPEC). This is total bits per utterance, scaled by the length of the aligned English sentence, so it does not depend on a language's orthography.

Two model families are compared: a hybrid word/character Kneser–Ney n-gram model and a character-level LSTM. Inflectional richness is quantified with counting complexity computed from UniMorph lexicons. Under both models, languages with richer inflection get worse BPEC, but this link disappears once the corpora are lemmatized.

The finding shows that character-level neural models do not automatically overcome morphological richness. It remains unresolved whether such languages carry more information or current models fail to capture predictable morphemes.

## Key points
- **Data and splits:** the 21 Europarl languages are used, all Indo-European except the Uralic Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian. The split is about 80/10/10 train/dev/test, and characters seen fewer than 100 times are mapped to an unknown symbol.
- **Models:** the baseline is a 7-gram hybrid open-vocabulary Kneser–Ney model. The neural model is a character-level PyTorch LSTM with 1024-dimensional embeddings and 2 hidden layers of 1024; it beats the n-gram model on every language.
- **Correlation with inflection:** for the LSTM, Spearman's ρ between BPEC on word forms and counting complexity is 0.59 (p \< 0.005). On lemmata it falls to −0.13 (p ≈ 0.56), which is not significant.
- **Effect of lemmatization:** removing inflection shrinks the spread of BPEC across languages, with the standard deviation dropping from 0.065 to 0.039 bits. Finnish word forms are harder to model than English ones, yet Finnish lemmata are easier.
- **BPEC vs. BPC:** ranking languages by BPC misleadingly places English mid-pack, below French. Under BPEC, English is the easiest language for the LSTM, with Danish and Swedish closest to it.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Ryan Cotterell, Sabrina J. Mielke, Jason Eisner and Brian Roark. 2018. Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model?. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{cotterell2018are,
  title = {{Are All Languages Equally Hard to Language-Model?}},
  author = {Ryan Cotterell, Sabrina J. Mielke, Jason Eisner and Brian Roark},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/n18-2085},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n18-2085}
}
```

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*Updated 24 October 2026*