Latent Geographical Factors for Analyzing the Evolution of Dialects in Contact

Abstract

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.

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