Machine-Aided Linguistic Discovery - An Introduction and Some Examples - Vladimir Pericliev
Inferring Plausible Laws/Patterns II: UNIVAUTO and Implicational Phonological Universals
Machine-Aided Linguistic Discovery - An Introduction and Some Examples - Vladimir Pericliev
Vladimir Pericliev [+]
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
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Vladimir Pericliev is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics & Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, with over 60 publications in general and computational linguistics, Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of science.
Description
In this chapter is described the computational exploration of the UPSID database, comprising the segment inventories of 451 languages, for implicational universals of type A → B (“If Segment A, then Segment B”). UNIVAUTO found and verbalized 146 statistically significant (near) universals that are supported by languages from at least two language families from at least two geographical areas. Some implications of these findings are discussed.