Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization

Xiaoxi Luo, Weiwei Sun


Abstract
This paper is concerned with phonetic reconstruction of the consonant system of Middle Chinese. We propose to cast the problem as a Mixed Integer Programming problem, which is able to automatically explore homophonic information from ancient rhyme dictionaries and phonetic information from modern Chinese dialects, the descendants of Middle Chinese. Numerical evaluation on a wide range of synthetic and real data demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the new method. We apply the method to information from Guǎngyùn and 20 modern Chinese dialects to obtain a new phonetic reconstruction result. A linguistically motivated discussion of this result is also provided.1
Anthology ID:
2025.tacl-1.21
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 13
Month:
Year:
2025
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
424–441
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-07/2025.tacl-1.21/
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00742
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoxi Luo and Weiwei Sun. 2025. Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 13:424–441.
Cite (Informal):
Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization (Luo & Sun, TACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-07/2025.tacl-1.21.pdf