PILA: A Historical-Linguistic Dataset of Proto-Italic and Latin
This provides a new computational resource for historical linguists focusing on Italic languages, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The authors introduced the PILA dataset, containing about 3,000 pairs of Proto-Italic and Latin forms, to aid in studying Italic sound change, and demonstrated its utility through baseline task results and dataset compatibility enhancements.
Computational historical linguistics seeks to systematically understand processes of sound change, including during periods at which little to no formal recording of language is attested. At the same time, few computational resources exist which deeply explore phonological and morphological connections between proto-languages and their descendants. This is particularly true for the family of Italic languages. To assist historical linguists in the study of Italic sound change, we introduce the Proto-Italic to Latin (PILA) dataset, which consists of roughly 3,000 pairs of forms from Proto-Italic and Latin. We provide a detailed description of how our dataset was created and organized. Then, we exhibit PILA's value in two ways. First, we present baseline results for PILA on a pair of traditional computational historical linguistics tasks. Second, we demonstrate PILA's capability for enhancing other historical-linguistic datasets through a dataset compatibility study.