Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction
Johann-Mattis List Nathan W. Hill Robert Forkel Frederic Blum
Despite the inherently fuzzy nature of reconstructions in historical
linguistics, most scholars do not represent their uncertainty when proposing
proto-forms. With the increasing success of recently proposed approaches to
automating certain aspects of the traditional comparative method, the formal
representation of proto-forms has also improved. This formalization makes it
possible to address both the representation and the computation of uncertainty.
Building on recent advances in supervised phonological reconstruction, during
which an algorithm learns how to reconstruct words in a given proto-language
relying on previously annotated data, and inspired by improved methods for
automated word prediction from cognate sets, we present a new framework that
allows for the representation of uncertainty in linguistic reconstruction and
also includes a workflow for the computation of fuzzy reconstructions from
linguistic data.