Browsing by Author "Lv, Guowei"

This master thesis discusses two main tasks of computational etymology. First, finding cognates in multilingual text. Second, finding underlying correspondence rules by aligning cognates. For the first part, I briefly described two categories of methods in identifying cognates: symbol based and phonetic based. For the second part, I described the Etymon project, which I had been working in. The Etymon project uses a probabilistic method and Minimum Description Length principle to align cognate sets. The objective of this project is to build a model which can automatically find as much information in the cognates as possible without linguistic knowledge as well as find genetic relationship between those languages. I also discussed the experiment that I did to explore the uncertainty in the data source.