Florian Wandl


2020

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In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology
Chundra Cathcart | Florian Wandl
Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

This paper investigates the ability of neural network architectures to effectively learn diachronic phonological generalizations in amultilingual setting. We employ models using three different types of language embedding (dense, sigmoid, and straight-through). We find that the Straight-Through model out-performs the other two in terms of accuracy, but the Sigmoid model’s language embeddings show the strongest agreement with the traditional subgrouping of the Slavic languages. We find that the Straight-Through model has learned coherent, semi-interpretable information about sound change, and outline directions for future research.