Section: New Results

Advances in descriptive, computational and historical linguistics

Participants : Benoît Sagot, Laurent Romary, Jack Bowers, Rebecca Blevins.

ALMAnaCH members have resumed their work in descriptive, computational and historical linguistics, an important way to ensure that NLP models and tools are robust to the diversity of world languages, as well as a way to apply NLP models and tools for contributing to research in linguistics. Three of 2018 advances in this regard are the following:

• In the context of the doctoral work of Jack Bowers, a first release of a global documentation of the Mixtepec-Mixtec language has been released which covers, multilayered annotated spoken and written resources as well as a reference lexical resource covering both basic word descriptions and elaborate semantic and etymological (word formation) content [13];

• Work on language description and computational morphology for Romansh Tuatschin in collaboration with Géraldine Walther (Universität Zürich) was pursued, following the work published in 2017 [99]. A new interest in the quantitative, corpus-based study of code switching in this language has emerged in collaboration with Claudia Cathomas (Universität Zürich), leading to preliminary results to be published in 2019;

• We resumed our work in (classical) etymology in collaboration with Romain Garnier (Université de Limoges, Institut Universitaire de France), with a focus not only on (Ancient) Greek and its substrates, but also, more specifically, on Anatolian languages that could be amongst said substrates. In particular, we proposed that Lydian could be the source language for a number of Greek words lacking a good etymology in the literature [31], which motivated Rebecca Blevins's internship on the development of a lexicon of the Lydian language. We also published new etymological results at the (Proto-)Indo-European level [37].