Dating and Stratifying a Historical Corpus with a Bayesian Mixture Model

Oliver Hellwig


Abstract
This paper introduces and evaluates a Bayesian mixture model that is designed for dating texts based on the distributions of linguistic features. The model is applied to the corpus of Vedic Sanskrit the historical structure of which is still unclear in many details. The evaluation concentrates on the interaction between time, genre and linguistic features, detecting those whose distributions are clearly coupled with the historical time. The evaluation also highlights the problems that arise when quantitative results need to be reconciled with philological insights.
Anthology ID:
2020.lt4hala-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
Venue:
LT4HALA
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1–9
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lt4hala-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Oliver Hellwig. 2020. Dating and Stratifying a Historical Corpus with a Bayesian Mixture Model. In Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, pages 1–9, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Dating and Stratifying a Historical Corpus with a Bayesian Mixture Model (Hellwig, LT4HALA 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lt4hala-1.1.pdf