TY - GEN
T1 - Improved reconstruction of protolanguage word forms
AU - Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Klein, Dan
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - We present an unsupervised approach to reconstructing ancient word forms. The present work addresses three limitations of previous work. First, previous work focused on faithfulness features, which model changes between successive languages. We add markedness features, which model well-formedness within each language. Second, we introduce universal features, which support generalizations across languages. Finally, we increase the number of languages to which these methods can be applied by an order of magnitude by using improved inference methods. Experiments on the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic, Proto-Malayo-Javanic, and Classical Latin show substantial reductions in error rate, giving the best results to date.
AB - We present an unsupervised approach to reconstructing ancient word forms. The present work addresses three limitations of previous work. First, previous work focused on faithfulness features, which model changes between successive languages. We add markedness features, which model well-formedness within each language. Second, we introduce universal features, which support generalizations across languages. Finally, we increase the number of languages to which these methods can be applied by an order of magnitude by using improved inference methods. Experiments on the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic, Proto-Malayo-Javanic, and Classical Latin show substantial reductions in error rate, giving the best results to date.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79952758415&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79952758415&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3115/1620754.1620764
DO - 10.3115/1620754.1620764
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79952758415
SN - 9781932432411
T3 - NAACL HLT 2009 - Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
SP - 65
EP - 73
BT - NAACL HLT 2009 - Human Language Technologies
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
T2 - Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, NAACL HLT 2009
Y2 - 31 May 2009 through 5 June 2009
ER -