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<Paper uid="W04-0103">
  <Title>A Diachronic Approach for Schwa Deletion in Indo Aryan Languages</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Linguists propose new models for languages in order to explain language acquisition and processing by humans. Irregularities and exceptions to the theories are often explained by evidence from diachronic linguistics and other social and external phenomena. Absence of diachronic analysis in computational modelling of languages results in a large number of exceptions, which are commonly handled by ad hoc rules or exhaustive enumeration. These techniques lead to poor scalability and lack of graceful degradation of the systems along with increased complexity.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Although complete modelling of the evolution of language is impossible due to the involvement of myriads of socio-political and cultural factors, it is definitely possible to model certain basic principles of language change.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this paper we describe an algorithm for schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan Languages (IAL) that is motivated by the diachronic evolution of the languages. The proposed computational framework models languages as a constrained optimization system, where a language evolves by optimizing the rate of communication, subjected to a set of constraints such as ease of articulation and learning, and acoustic distinctiveness. A syllable minimization based optimization function fitted to the aforementioned model has been used for solving the problem of schwa deletion with considerable success.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 defines the problem and discusses some of the previous works. Section 3 describes the current models of language evolution, which has been used to develop a computational framework described in the next section. Section 5 and 6 presents the algorithm and its experimental analysis respectively. Section 7 concludes the paper summarizing our contributions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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