Gaussian Process Models of Sound Change in Indo-Aryan Dialectology

AbstractThis paper proposes a Gaussian Process model of sound change targeted toward questions in Indo-Aryan dialectology. Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide a flexible means of expressing covariance between outcomes, and can be extended to a wide variety of probability distributions. We find that GP models fare better in terms of some key posterior predictive checks than models that do not express covariance between sound changes, and outline directions for future work.