TY - GEN
T1 - A probabilistic approach to language change
AU - Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre
AU - Liang, Percy
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Klein, Dan
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - We present a probabilistic approach to language change in which word forms are represented by phoneme sequences that undergo stochastic edits along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. This framework combines the advantages of the classical comparative method with the robustness of corpus-based probabilistic models. We use this framework to explore the consequences of two different schemes for defining probabilistic models of phonological change, evaluating these schemes by reconstructing ancient word forms of Romance languages. The result is an efficient inference procedure for automatically inferring ancient word forms from modern languages, which can be generalized to support inferences about linguistic phylogenies.
AB - We present a probabilistic approach to language change in which word forms are represented by phoneme sequences that undergo stochastic edits along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. This framework combines the advantages of the classical comparative method with the robustness of corpus-based probabilistic models. We use this framework to explore the consequences of two different schemes for defining probabilistic models of phonological change, evaluating these schemes by reconstructing ancient word forms of Romance languages. The result is an efficient inference procedure for automatically inferring ancient word forms from modern languages, which can be generalized to support inferences about linguistic phylogenies.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85162067019
SN - 160560352X
SN - 9781605603520
T3 - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 - Proceedings of the 2007 Conference
BT - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 20 - Proceedings of the 2007 Conference
PB - Neural Information Processing Systems
T2 - 21st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2007
Y2 - 3 December 2007 through 6 December 2007
ER -