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

在国家科学基金会的支持下，坦迪·沃诺博士和唐纳德·林格博士将进行为期三年的语言学研究，旨在恢复语言家族的进化历史。传统的模型和方法假设语言以分叉的方式进化，在这种情况下，树是语言进化的适当图形模型。项目负责人Warnow和林格（也由NSF资助）的早期工作产生了精确的计算方法，用于推断语言进化是树状的，并导致了对印欧语系如何进化的理解的进步。然而，印欧语系（以及其他语系）进化的完整解析需要能够重建非树状进化历史的方法和模型。该项目结合了计算机科学算法，统计推断和建模以及历史语言学的研究，以产生重建语言家族进化历史的有效手段。它还借鉴了分子进化中的相关工作。因此，该项目影响了几个领域，它将为历史语言学领域带来新的技术和研究方法。该项目开发的开源软件工具也将影响其他领域，特别是将帮助人口遗传学家和人类学家解决与人类起源和迁移有关的问题。该项目将包括历史语言学讲习班，从而向一大批研究人员提供这一多学科领域的培训。

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.