Terry Szymanski’s Qualifying Research Paper has been approved.  The paper, “Computational Approaches to Sound Change and Reconstruction, ” uses a probabilistic model of language change and diversification as the basis for a reconstruction algorithm. Given cognate word-lists from two or more cognate word lists, the goal of the algorithm is to reconstruct the form of the words in the proto-language, derive the necessary sound changes, and determine the most likely topology for linguistic phylogeny. Experiments show that the algorithm is successful on small, simulated data sets, and should be extensible for application to real language data.

Terry now advances to Doctoral candidacy.  Congratulations, Terry!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Computational, Graduate.