I am a Research Fellow at the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey. I study inflectional systems using computational methodologies.

My current project is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, studying morphological comprehension using neural models. I joined the Surrey Morphology Group in 2021 for a British Academy Newton International Fellowship. Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the DLCE department of the Max Planck Institute (EVA/SHH), working on morphological and phonological changes in diachrony. During my PhD at Université Paris Cité (then "Université Paris Diderot"), I studied the typological variation of inflection classes (declensions or conjugations) using computational methods.

My research interests include computational approaches to linguistic theory, morphological typology, inflection, open data, lexicons.

Publications

Journal articles and special issues

• Olivier Bonami, Maria Copot and Sacha Beniamine (accepted). Morphologie implicative et conjugaison du français. Special issue of Langue Française on French Morphology.
• Mae Carroll & Sacha Beniamine (2025). Exponence and the theory of discriminative information in paradigms. Morphology 35, 227–269. DOI: 10.1007/s11525-025-09437-2
• Micha Elsner, Sacha Beniamine (2024). Computational approaches to morphological typology. Special issue of the Journal of Language Modelling, 12(2), 271–286. DOI: 10.15398/jlm.v12i2.431
• Erich Round, Louise Esher & Sacha Beniamine (2024). The natural stability of autonomous morphology: how an attraction–repulsion dynamic emerges from paradigm cell filling. Morphology. DOI: 10.1007/s11525-024-09433-y
• Emily Lindsay-Smith, Matthew Baerman, Sacha Beniamine, Helen Sims-Williams, Erich Round (2024). Analogy in Inflection. In: Annual Review of Linguistics. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-040935

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami, Ana R. Luís (2021). The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation. In: Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics. DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.109 | Dataset

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami, Benoı̂t Sagot (2017). Inferring Inflection Classes with Description Length. In: Journal of Language Modelling. PDF | DOI

• Olivier Bonami, Sacha Beniamine (2016). Joint predictiveness in inflectional paradigms. In: Word Structure. DOI

Book chapters

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami (2023). Inflection Class Systems. In: Peter Ackema, Sabrina Bendjaballah, Eulàlia Bonet, Antonio Fàbregas (eds.), Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology. DOI: 10.1002/9781119693604.morphcom038 Write me an email if you want the pdf !
• Olivier Bonami, Sacha Beniamine (2021). Leaving the stem by itself. In: Marcia Haag, Sedigheh Moradi, Andrija Petrovic, Janie Rees-Miller (eds.), All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.353.05bon
• Sacha Beniamine (2021). One lexeme, many classes: inflection class systems as lattices. In: One-to-Many Relations in Morphology, Syntax and Semantics.

Dissertation

• Sacha Beniamine (2018). Classifications flexionnelles: Étude quantitative des structures de paradigmes. In: Université Sorbonne Paris Cité - Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7), PhD thesis under the supervision of Olivier Bonami. PDF

Talks & Conference papers

2025

Upcoming !

• Jules Bouton, Olivier Bonami and Sacha Beniamine (2025). Where is “regular morphology” in the lexicon ? Revisiting the role of type vs. token frequency in inflection. ISMo 2025 Conference. Lille, France, Sept 2025.

• Jules Bouton and Sacha Beniamine, How do inflectional classes diverge? A case study in the Finnic languages (2025). SLE 2025 conference. Bordeaux, France, Aug 2025.
• Sacha Beniamine and Jules Bouton (2025). Measuring morphological complexity: what's new, and what's on the horizon . 14th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting. Zadar.

2024

• Mae Carroll, Sacha Beniamine (2024). A 'data-direct' typology of exponence. 15th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology. -Sacha Beniamine, Maximin Coavoux, Olivier Bonami. Vlexique2.0: A rich lexicon of French verbal inflection with form-level frequencies. 21st International Morphology Meeting – IMM21. Vienna, Austria, 28 - 30 Août 2024.
• Matteo Pellegrini, Borja Herce, Sacha Beniamine. The evolution of paradigms from Latin to Romance. A quantitative approach. 21st International Morphology Meeting – IMM21. Vienna, Austria, 28 - 30 Aug 2024.
• Erich Round, Sacha Beniamine, Louise Esher. How details of analogy shape inflectional typology. 21st International Morphology Meeting – IMM21. Vienne, Autriche, 28 - 30 Aug 2024.
• Sacha Beniamine, Mari Aigro, Matthew Baerman, Jules Bouton, and Maria Copot (2024). Eesthetic: A Paralex Lexicon of Estonian Paradigms. Proceedings of: 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5526–5537, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL. dataset
• Cormac Anderson, Sacha Beniamine, and Theodorus Fransen (2024). Goidelex: A Lexical Resource for Old Irish. Proceedings of: Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024, pages 1–10, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
• Theodorus Fransen, Cormac Anderson, Sacha Beniamine, and Marco Passarotti (2024). [The MOLOR Lemma Bank: a New LLOD Resource for Old Irish]((https://aclanthology.org/2024.ldl-1.5). Proceedings of: 9th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 37–43, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.

older presentations

2023

• Sacha Beniamine, Mae Carroll (2023). The other perspective on exponence. Presentation at International Symposium of Morphology 2023, Nancy, Sep 15, 2023.
• Erich Round, Louise Esher, Sacha Beniamine (2023). The role of paradigm-external anchoring in simulating the emergence of inflection class systems. Presentation at International Symposium of Morphology 2023, Nancy, Sep 14, 2023
• Sacha Beniamine, Cormac Anderson, Mae Carroll, Matías Guzmán Naranjo, Borja Herce, Matteo Pellegrini, Erich Round, Helen Sims-Williams, Tiago Tresoldi (2023). Paralex: a DeAR standard for rich lexicons of inflected forms. Presentation at International Symposium of Morphology 2023, Nancy, Sep 13, 2023
• Erich Round, Sacha Beniamine, Louise Esher (2023). The natural stability of ‘unnatural’ morphology. Presentation at 26th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL26), Heidelberg, Sep 4, 2023 PDF
• Cormac Anderson, Theodorus Fransen, Sacha Beniamine (2023). Developing an inflectional lexicon for Old Irish. Presentation at XVIIth International Congress of Celtic Studies, Utrecht, Jul 24, 2023. PDF
• Theodorus Fransen, Cormac Anderson, Sacha Beniamine (2023). Towards a normalised orthography for Old Irish. Presentation at Themed Session Standardising digital resources for Early Irish, 36th Irish Conference of Medievalists, Dublin, Jun 22, 2023
• Sacha Beniamine (2023). Who cares about comprehension? Presentation at Tabu Dag 2023, keynote presentation, Groningen, Jun 16, 2023

2022

• Mae Carroll, Sacha Beniamine (2022). Morphological exponence: theory, implementation and typology. Presentation at ALS 2022, Melbourne, Nov 30, 2022 PDF
• Erich Round, Stephen Mann, Sacha Beniamine, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Louise Esher, Matt Spike (2022). Cognition and the stability of evolving complex morphology: an agent-based model. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE),Kanazawa, Japan. PDF | code | video | attachments
• Sacha Beniamine (2022). Open data: how do we get there, concretely? Presentation at Surrey Linguistics Circle, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, Sep 27, 2022
• Theodorus Fransen, Cormac Anderson, Sacha Beniamine (2022). Developing an inflectional lexicon for Old Irish. Presentation at 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL25), Oxford, Aug 2, 2022 PDF
• Sacha Beniamine, Erich Round (2022). Two Decades of Open Data for Language Diversity at the Surrey Morphology Group. Presentation at Open Research Annual Lecture Event, University of Surrey, Apr 8, 2022

2021

• Sacha Beniamine, Matías Guzmán Naranjo (2021). Multiple alignments of inflectional paradigms. In: Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics: Vol. 4, Article 21. PDF | Dataset | aclanthology | code (1) | code (2)
• Erich Round, Sacha Beniamine, Louise Esher (2021). The role of attraction-repulsion dynamics in simulating the emergence of inflectional class systems. Presentation at ISMo 2021: International Symposium of Morphology 2021, Online, Sep 22, 2021. PDF
• Erich Round, Sacha Beniamine, Louise Esher (2021). Spontaneous emergence of inflectional class systems via attraction-repulsion dynamics. Presentation at 5th American International Morphology Meeting, Online, Aug 27, 2021

2020

• Sacha Beniamine, Martin Maiden, Erich Round (2020). Opening the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0: A CLDF lexicon. In: Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. PDF
• Erich Round, Mark Ellison, Jayden Macklin-Cordes, Sacha Beniamine (2020). Automated Parsing of Interlinear Glossed Text from Page Images of Grammatical Descriptions. In: Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. PDF
• Sacha Beniamine, Matías Guzmán Naranjo (2020). Towards automatic morphological analysis: aligning inflected forms. Presentation at How To Fill A Cell: Computational Approaches To Inflectional Morphology, Online, Sep 16, 2020
• Sacha Beniamine (2020). Simulating paradigm Evolution. Presentation at Surrey Linguistics Circle, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, Jan 22, 2020

2019

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami (2019). Segmentation in morphology: wh-en, wh-ere, how ?. Presentation at 4th American International Morphology Meeting, Stony Brook, May 4, 2019 Slides | Abstract

2018

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami (2018). The segmentation problem in inflectional morphology. Presentation at New approaches to the typology of inflectional systems, University of Chicago Center in Paris, Nov 16, 2018

2017

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami, Joyce McDonough (2017). When segmentation helps. Implicative structure and morph boundaries in the Navajo verb. In: First International Symposium on Morphology (ISMo). PDF
• Sacha Beniamine (2017). Un algorithme universel pour l'abstraction automatique d'alternances morphophonologiques. In: 24e Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN). PDF
• Sacha Beniamine (2017). A computational approach to the abstraction of morphopholonogical alternations. Presentation at workshop: Typologie et modélisation des systèmes morphologiques, University of Chicago Center in Paris, Jan 12, 2017

2016

• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami (2016). A comprehensive view on inflectional classification. Presentation at Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), Sep 9, 2016. Slides
• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami (2016). Generalizing patterns in Instrumented Item-and-Pattern Morphology. Presentation at Structural Complexity in Natural Language(s) (SCNL), Maison de la Recherche (Université de Paris 3), May 30, 2016

2015

• Olivier Bonami, Sacha Beniamine (2015). Implicative structure and joint predictiveness. In: Proceedings of the NetWordS Final Conference on Word Knowledge andWord Usage: Representations and Processes in the Mental Lexicon.
• Sacha Beniamine, Benoît Sagot (2015). Segmentation strategies for inflection class inference. Presentation at Décembrettes 9, Colloque international de morphologie, Toulouse, France, Dec 1, 2015
• Sacha Beniamine, Olivier Bonami, Benoît Sagot (2015). Information-theoretic inflectional classification. Presentation at 1st International Quantitative Morphology Meeting, Belgrade, Jul 11, 2015
• Sacha Beniamine (2015). Quantitative assessment of morphological complexity. Presentation at Labex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL) Symposium, Université Paris 7, Jun 16, 2015

Software

Qumín: (Quantitative Modelling of Inflection) is a python package for the computational modelling of the inflectional morphology of languages. It allows for systematic exploration of inflection classes and predictability within these systems. The current version takes as input any paralex lexicons. Qumin was first written as the companion scripts to my PhD dissertation, and has since grown into a more general toolkit. docs | code | pypi

Nuerdle & Archidle: Play the wordle, in Archi or Nuer, with definitions drawn from the SMG databases !