Sven Sellmer


2022

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Detecting Diachronic Syntactic Developments in Presence of Bias Terms
Oliver Hellwig | Sven Sellmer
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

Corpus-based studies of diachronic syntactic changes are typically guided by the results of previous qualitative research. When such results are missing or, as is the case for Vedic Sanskrit, are restricted to small parts of a transmitted corpus, an exploratory framework that detects such changes in a data-driven fashion can substantially support the research process. In this paper, we introduce a customized version of the infinite relational model that groups syntactic constituents based on their structural similarities and their diachronic distributions. We propose a simple way to control for register and intellectual affiliation, and discuss our findings for four syntactic structures in Vedic texts.
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