This course will introduce the mathematical foundations of estimating evolutionary histories, primarily with a focus on historical linguistics (and so evolutionary history estimation of languages) but will include a discussion of how these questions are handled in biology. Topics of particular interest include statistical models of language evolution, detecting borrowing between languages, and using methods from biology to analyze linguistic data. There may also be a lab component, in which course attendees may be able to analyze linguistic data using computational methods.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/
Basic comfort with mathematical abstraction.
The course text will be: Nichols, J. and T. Warnow. 2008. Tutorial on computational linguistic phylogeny. Linguistics and Language Compass. 2(5):760-820. Also, see DOI entry here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00082.x
Tandy Warnow |
Email: tandy (AT) cs (DOT) utexas (DOT) edu
Homepage: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/tandy
Bio:Tandy Warnow is David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in both biology and historical linguistics. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler, and did postdoctoral training with Simon Tavare and Michael Waterman at USC. She received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011.
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