ITR: Collaborative Research, Algorithms for Inferring Reticulate Evolution in Historical Linguistics

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Tandy Warnow and Dr. Donald Ringe will conduct three years of linguistic research aimed at recovering the evolutionary history of families of languages. Traditional models and methods assume that languages evolve in a bifurcating manner, in which case trees are appropriate graphical models of language evolution. Earlier work by the project leaders Warnow and Ringe (also funded by NSF) produced accurate computational methods for inferring evolution when the evolution of the languages is tree-like and led to advances in the understanding of how the Indo-European family evolved. However, a full resolution of the evolution of Indo-European (and of other language families) requires methods and models that can reconstruct evolutionary histories that are not treelike. The project combines research in computer science algorithms, statistical inference and modeling, and historical linguistics to produce effective means for reconstructing evolutionary histories of language families. It also draws on related work in molecular evolution. The project thus impacts several fields, and it will bring novel techniques and research methods to the field of historical linguistics. The open source software tools developed during this project will impact other fields as well, and in particular will help population geneticists and anthropologists resolve questions related to human origins and migrations. The project will include workshops in historical linguistics and will thus provide training in this multidisciplinary area to a broad group of researchers.