Papers › Unsupervised Protoform Reconstruction through Parsimonious Rule-guided Heuristics and...
Unsupervised Protoform Reconstruction through Parsimonious Rule-guided Heuristics and Evolutionary Search
Promise Dodzi Kpoglu
We propose an unsupervised method for the reconstruction of protoforms i.e., ancestral word forms from which modern language forms are derived. While prior work has primarily relied on probabilistic models of phonological edits to infer protoforms from cognate sets, such approaches are limited by their predominantly data-driven nature. In contrast, our model integrates data-driven inference with rule-based heuristics within an evolutionary optimization framework. This hybrid approach leverages on both statistical patterns and linguistically motivated constraints to guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our method on the task of reconstructing Latin protoforms using a dataset of cognates from five Romance languages. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over established baselines across both character-level accuracy and phonological plausibility metrics.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections