Automating Sound Change Prediction for Phylogenetic Inference: A Tukanoan Case Study

Kalvin Chang, Nathaniel Robinson, Anna Cai, Ting Chen, Annie Zhang, David Mortensen


Abstract
We describe a set of new methods to partially automate linguistic phylogenetic inference given (1) cognate sets with their respective protoforms and sound laws, (2) a mapping from phones to their articulatory features and (3) a typological database of sound changes.We train a neural network on these sound change data to weight articulatory distances between phones and predict intermediate sound change steps between historical protoforms and their modern descendants, replacing a linguistic expert in part of a parsimony-based phylogenetic inference algorithm. In our best experiments on Tukanoan languages, this method produces trees with a Generalized Quartet Distance of 0.12 from a tree that used expert annotations, a significant improvement over other semi-automated baselines. We discuss potential benefits and drawbacks to our neural approach and parsimony-based tree prediction. We also experiment with a minimal generalization learner for automatic sound law induction, finding it less effective than sound laws from expert annotation. Our code is publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2023.lchange-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, David Alfter, Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
129–142
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kalvin Chang, Nathaniel Robinson, Anna Cai, Ting Chen, Annie Zhang, and David Mortensen. 2023. Automating Sound Change Prediction for Phylogenetic Inference: A Tukanoan Case Study. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 129–142, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automating Sound Change Prediction for Phylogenetic Inference: A Tukanoan Case Study (Chang et al., LChange 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.14.pdf