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<H1>Thesis abstract</H1>
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<LI><B>Grzegorz Kondrak.</B><BR>
<I>Algorithms for Language Reconstruction.</I><BR>
PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, July 2002.
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<P>Genetically related languages originate from a common
proto-language. In the absence of historical records, proto-languages
have to be reconstructed from surviving cognates, that is words that
existed in the proto-language and are still present in some form in
its descendants. The language reconstruction methods have so far been
largely based on informal and intuitive criteria. In this thesis, I
present techniques and algorithms for performing various stages of the
reconstruction process automatically.
<P>The thesis is divided into three main parts that correspond to the
principal steps of language reconstruction. The first part presents a
new algorithm for the alignment of cognates, which is sufficiently
general to align any two phonetic strings that exhibit some
affinity. The second part introduces a method of identifying cognates
directly from the vocabularies of related languages on the basis of
phonetic and semantic similarity. The third part describes an approach
to the determination of recurrent sound correspondences in bilingual
wordlists by inducing models similar to those developed for
statistical machine translation.
<P>The proposed solutions are firmly grounded in computer science and
incorporate recent advances in computational linguistics, articulatory
phonetics, and bioinformatics. The applications of the new techniques
are not limited to diachronic phonology, but extend to other areas of
computational linguistics, such as machine translation.
<P><A NAME="Download"></A><B>Download:</B> <A
HREF="http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kondrak/thesis.pdf">PDF file</A>
(1.0 Mb); <A
HREF="http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kondrak/thesis.ps">
PostScript file</A> (1.2 Mb).<BR> <B>Request paper copy:</B> Send
request with postal address to <A
href="mailto:gh@cs.toronto.edu">gh@cs.toronto.edu.</A>
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