# Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04625 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04625/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Ab Antiquo: Neural Proto-language Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02477/) (2019)
- [A New Framework for Fast Automated Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04619/) (2022)
- [SEER : A Knapsack approach to Exemplar Selection for In-Context HybridQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06675/) (2023)
- [Improved Neural Protoform Reconstruction via Reflex Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18769/) (2024)
- [Neural Unsupervised Reconstruction of Protolanguage Word Forms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08684/) (2022)
- [Transformed Protoform Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01896/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper is concerned with phonetic reconstruction of the consonant system of Middle Chinese. We propose to cast the problem as a Mixed Integer Programming problem, which is able to automatically explore homophonic information from ancient rhyme dictionaries and phonetic information from modern Chinese dialects, the descendants of Middle Chinese. Numerical evaluation on a wide range of synthetic and real data demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the new method. We apply the method to information from Guangyun and 20 modern Chinese dialects to obtain a new phonetic reconstruction result. A linguistically-motivated discussion of this result is also provided.