A1691
Title: A phylogenetic model of the evolution of discrete matrices for the inference of lexical \& phonological language history
Authors: Robin Ryder - Imperial College London (United Kingdom) [presenting]
Abstract: A model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree is introduced, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data, by allowing for new words to appear and for systematic phonological changes to affect the entire vocabulary. We implement a Sequential Monte Carlo method to sample from the posterior distribution, and infer jointly the phylogeny, model parameters, and latent variables representing cognate births and phonological transformations. We successfully apply this method to synthetic and real data of moderate size.
