4 ms·

Does anyone here know if recent advances in ML are relevant at all to this kind of linguistic study? Are there attempts being made to adapt them? I would imagin

Does anyone here know if recent advances in ML are relevant at all to this kind of linguistic study? Are there attempts being made to adapt them? I would imagine there's enough of a literary corpus in Basque to compare it with various other existing languages, and maybe (based on no evidence at all, admittedly, though the recent developments with AlphaGo seem encouraging, albeit in a different direction) human researchers have missed some patterns that would reveal themselves to a well-trained neural network.

upquark 10y ago
It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core. As for ML methods, I know for a fact that modern Bayesian inference techniques have been successfully applied in comparative linguistics and proto-language reconstruction.
- tacomonstrous 10y ago
  >It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core. I should have made this clearer, but the 'question' I had in mind was not whether Basque is related to Georgian, but the more general one of whether it's related to anything at all.
ar-jan 10y ago
I haven't heard of neural network approaches, but people are using and working on improving automated comparisons to detect relationships. A recent article discusses its application to word lists: The Potential of Automatic Word Comparison for Historical Linguistics http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0170046 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- tacomonstrous 10y ago
  Thanks for the link! It's refreshing that the PDF wasn't behind a paywall.
  - ar-jan 10y ago
    Indeed! Linguistics is doing pretty well in increasing open-access (e.g. with journals like http://www.glossa-journal.org http://www.glossa-journal.org and publishers like http://langsci-press.org/catalog http://langsci-press.org/catalog), as well as open data (e.g. http://clld.org/datasets.html http://clld.org/datasets.html).
aspenmayer 10y ago
I admittedly understand very little about ML and how Google is using it in Translate, but this seems relevant. In “Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation”, we address this challenge by extending our previous GNMT system, allowing for a single system to translate between multiple languages. Our proposed architecture requires no change in the base GNMT system, but instead uses an additional “token” at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language to translate to. In addition to improving translation quality, our method also enables “Zero-Shot Translation” — translation between language pairs never seen explicitly by the system. https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translatio... The related research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558

upquark 10y ago

It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core. As for ML methods, I know for a fact that modern Bayesian inference techniques have been successfully applied in comparative linguistics and proto-language reconstruction.

tacomonstrous 10y ago
>It's just that the answer to the question posed in the headline is a definite 'no'. This type of silly inquiry into "is Azeri related to Sumerian", "is Georgian related to Chinese" etc. is very common in that part of the world, and is largely pseudo-scientific at its core. I should have made this clearer, but the 'question' I had in mind was not whether Basque is related to Georgian, but the more general one of whether it's related to anything at all.

ar-jan 10y ago

I haven't heard of neural network approaches, but people are using and working on improving automated comparisons to detect relationships. A recent article discusses its application to word lists: The Potential of Automatic Word Comparison for Historical Linguistics http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0170046 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

tacomonstrous 10y ago
Thanks for the link! It's refreshing that the PDF wasn't behind a paywall.
- ar-jan 10y ago
  Indeed! Linguistics is doing pretty well in increasing open-access (e.g. with journals like http://www.glossa-journal.org http://www.glossa-journal.org and publishers like http://langsci-press.org/catalog http://langsci-press.org/catalog), as well as open data (e.g. http://clld.org/datasets.html http://clld.org/datasets.html).

aspenmayer 10y ago

I admittedly understand very little about ML and how Google is using it in Translate, but this seems relevant. In “Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation”, we address this challenge by extending our previous GNMT system, allowing for a single system to translate between multiple languages. Our proposed architecture requires no change in the base GNMT system, but instead uses an additional “token” at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language to translate to. In addition to improving translation quality, our method also enables “Zero-Shot Translation” — translation between language pairs never seen explicitly by the system. https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translatio... The related research paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558