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Ab Initio: Automatic Latin Proto-word Reconstruction

Alina Maria Ciobanu, Liviu P. Dinu


Abstract
Proto-word reconstruction is central to the study of language evolution. It consists of recreating the words in an ancient language from its modern daughter languages. In this paper we investigate automatic word form reconstruction for Latin proto-words. Having modern word forms in multiple Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian), we infer the form of their common Latin ancestors. Our approach relies on the regularities that occurred when the Latin words entered the modern languages. We leverage information from all modern languages, building an ensemble system for proto-word reconstruction. We use conditional random fields for sequence labeling, but we conduct preliminary experiments with recurrent neural networks as well. We apply our method on multiple datasets, showing that our method improves on previous results, having also the advantage of requiring less input data, which is essential in historical linguistics, where resources are generally scarce.
Anthology ID:
C18-1136
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1604–1614
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1136
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alina Maria Ciobanu and Liviu P. Dinu. 2018. Ab Initio: Automatic Latin Proto-word Reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1604–1614, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ab Initio: Automatic Latin Proto-word Reconstruction (Ciobanu & Dinu, COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1136.pdf