Improved Neural Protoform Reconstruction via Reflex Prediction

arXiv:2403.18769v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Protolanguage reconstruction is central to historical linguistics. The comparative method, one of the most influential theoretical and methodological frameworks in the history of the language sciences, allows linguists to infer protoforms (reconstructed ancestral words) from their reflexes (related modern words) based on the assumption of regular sound change. Not surprisingly, numerous computational linguists have attempted to operationalize comparative reconstruction through various computational models, the most successful of which have been supervised encoder-decoder models, which treat …

abstract arxiv change cs.cl frameworks history language linguistics modern prediction reflex sound type via words