Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction
Johann-Mattis List, Nathan Hill, Robert Forkel, Frederic Blum
Abstract
Despite the inherently fuzzy nature of reconstructions in historical linguistics, most scholars do not represent their uncertainty when proposing proto-forms. With the increasing success of recently proposed approaches to automating certain aspects of the traditional comparative method, the formal representation of proto-forms has also improved. This formalization makes it possible to address both the representation and the computation of uncertainty. Building on recent advances in supervised phonological reconstruction, during which an algorithm learns how to reconstruct words in a given proto-language relying on previously annotated data, and inspired by improved methods for automated word prediction from cognate sets, we present a new framework that allows for the representation of uncertainty in linguistic reconstruction and also includes a workflow for the computation of fuzzy reconstructions from linguistic data.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.lchange-1.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, David Alfter, Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti
- Venue:
- LChange
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 22–32
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.3
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.3
- Cite (ACL):
- Johann-Mattis List, Nathan Hill, Robert Forkel, and Frederic Blum. 2023. Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 22–32, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction (List et al., LChange 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.lchange-1.3.pdf