@inproceedings{kim-etal-2023-transformed,
    title = "Transformed Protoform Reconstruction",
    author = "Kim, Young Min  and
      Chang, Kalvin  and
      Cui, Chenxuan  and
      Mortensen, David R.",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.3",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.3",
    pages = "24--38",
    abstract = "Protoform reconstruction is the task of inferring what morphemes or words appeared like in the ancestral languages of a set of daughter languages. Meloni et al (2021) achieved the state-of-the-art on Latin protoform reconstruction with an RNN-based encoder-decoder with attention model. We update their model with the state-of-the-art seq2seq model: the Transformer. Our model outperforms their model on a suite of different metrics on two different datasets: their Romance data of 8,000 cognates spanning 5 languages and a Chinese dataset (Hou 2004) of 800+ cognates spanning 39 varieties. We also probe our model for potential phylogenetic signal contained in the model. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cmu-llab/acl-2023}.",
}

Protoform reconstruction is the task of inferring what morphemes or words appeared like in the ancestral languages of a set of daughter languages. Meloni et al (2021) achieved the state-of-the-art on Latin protoform reconstruction with an RNN-based encoder-decoder with attention model. We update their model with the state-of-the-art seq2seq model: the Transformer. Our model outperforms their model on a suite of different metrics on two different datasets: their Romance data of 8,000 cognates spanning 5 languages and a Chinese dataset (Hou 2004) of 800+ cognates spanning 39 varieties. We also probe our model for potential phylogenetic signal contained in the model. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cmu-llab/acl-2023}.
Kim, Young Min Chang, Kalvin Cui, Chenxuan Mortensen, David R.
Transformed Protoform Reconstruction