We are pleased to invite you to our upcoming Brown Bag meeting featuring Prof. Andrei Munteanu. The details of the event are as follows:
Speaker: Prof. Andrei Munteanu(National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)
Time: 12:10-13:10, Friday, March 20
Venue: HB 207 (人社二館 207) , NYCU
Registration: Please register in advance via the following link
https://forms.gle/G55jXkfLnZ5ua9r18
Abstract: I present Wordlist Distortion Theory, a probabilistic framework for evaluating comparative reconstruction attempts. The series of transformations – sound changes, borrowing, semantic change, etc. – acts as the input to the framework’s evaluation function. The output is the estimated probability that a randomly generated wordlist merits a reconstruction from the mother language using the same number of transformations (or fewer) than required by the daughter language. This estimate serves as a measure of the statistical reliability of the reconstruction: a reconstruction with a high probability of being substantiated by chance is defined to be less reliable while a reconstruction with a low probability of being substantiated by chance is defined to be more reliable. I briefly highlight the utility of this methodology by outlining some emergent theoretical insights and its uses as a cost function in machine learning approaches to historical linguistics.
