PILA: A Historical-Linguistic Dataset of Proto-Italic and Latin

TL;DR

PILA is a new dataset of approximately 3,000 Proto-Italic and Latin form pairs designed to support computational historical linguistics research on sound change and linguistic connections.

Contribution

The paper introduces PILA, a detailed dataset of Proto-Italic and Latin forms, and demonstrates its utility through baseline tasks and compatibility studies.

Findings

Baseline results for computational tasks on PILA.

PILA enhances the integration of historical-linguistic datasets.

Demonstrates PILA's usefulness in studying Italic sound change.

Abstract

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.