Abstract
Protoform reconstruction is the task of inferring what morphemes or words appeared like in the ancestral languages of a set of daughter languages. Meloni et al (2021) achieved the state-of-the-art on Latin protoform reconstruction with an RNN-based encoder-decoder with attention model. We update their model with the state-of-the-art seq2seq model: the Transformer. Our model outperforms their model on a suite of different metrics on two different datasets: their Romance data of 8,000 cognates spanning 5 languages and a Chinese dataset (Hou 2004) of 800+ cognates spanning 39 varieties. We also probe our model for potential phylogenetic signal contained in the model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cmu-llab/acl-2023.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-short.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 24–38
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.3
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.3
- Cite (ACL):
- Young Min Kim, Kalvin Chang, Chenxuan Cui, and David R. Mortensen. 2023. Transformed Protoform Reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 24–38, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Transformed Protoform Reconstruction (Kim et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.acl-short.3.pdf