A Probabilistic Approach to Diachronic Phonology

We present a probabilistic model of diachronic phonology in which individual word forms undergo stochastic edits along the branches of a phylogenetic tree. Our approach allows us to achieve three goals with a single unified model: (1) reconstruction of both ancient and modern word forms, (2) discovery of general phonological changes, and (3) selection among different phylogenies. We learn our model using a Monte Carlo EM algorithm and present quantitative results validating the model.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Percy Liang, Thomas L. Griffiths, Dan Klein
• Keywords: EMNLP 2007, Individual Word Forms, Natural Language Processing, Single Unified Model, Word Forms