News and Preprints

In the last week, an article presenting the major goals of the ProduSemy project appeared in the Passauer Neue Presse.

We also published a new preprint (common work with Nathan W. Hill, Xun Gong, and Seth Knights) on "Computer-Assisted Approaches to Rule-Based Phonological Reconstruction", which you can find here.

The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogrammarians. For at least six decades scholars have recognized the potential of transducers for improving the speed and rigor of research in historical linguists, but almost no historical linguists actually use them. This article identifies the obstacles facing the concrete use of transducers and introduces a software package built to reconstruct Proto-Burmish using transducers.