Latent Geographical Factors for Analyzing the Evolution of Dialects in Contact
Latent Geographical Factors for Analyzing the Evolution of Dialects in Contact
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DOI：
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.69
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发表时间：
2020-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Yugo Murawaki
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Yugo Murawaki
分析方言的演变仍然是一个具有挑战性的问题，因为接触现象阻碍了标准树模型的应用。以前对这个问题的统计方法求助于混合分析，在这种分析中，每一种方言都被视为潜在祖先群体的混合。然而，在树木模型的背景下，这样的祖先种群很难解释。在本文中，我们提出了一个概率生成模型，将潜在因素表示为地理分布。我们认为，所提出的模型与树模型具有更高的亲和力，因为树也可以被表示为一组地理分布。合成数据和实际数据的实验表明，该方法在数量和质量上都优于混合模型。
Analyzing the evolution of dialects remains a challenging problem because contact phenomena hinder the application of the standard tree model. Previous statistical approaches to this problem resort to admixture analysis, where each dialect is seen as a mixture of latent ancestral populations. However, such ancestral populations are hardly interpretable in the context of the tree model. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model that represents latent factors as geographical distributions. We argue that the proposed model has higher affinity with the tree model because a tree can alternatively be represented as a set of geographical distributions. Experiments involving synthetic and real data suggest that the proposed method is both quantitatively and qualitatively superior to the admixture model.