Automatic Methods for Sound Change Discovery
Name
Luo-j_luo-PhD-EECS-2021-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
6.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
041e8eab4a77545ffbd5fe9c2594a710
Author(s)
Luo, Jiaming
Advisor(s)
Barzilay, Regina
Date Issued
September 2021
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Describing the phonological history of languages has been a central topic in historical linguistics. In this thesis, we develop automatic methods to discover patterns of sound change in different settings of input and output conditions. More specifically, we focus on three challenging tasks: (1) automatic decipherment, (2) automatic decipherment in unsegmented scripts, and (3) automatic sound law induction. We show that a careful model design that implements historical linguists’ priors and intuitions is essential for the success of these methods. In addition, we demonstrate that these computational methods can provide relevant evidence to answer important research questions in historical linguistics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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