Related papers: Indo-European languages tree by Levenshtein distan…
Languages evolve over time in a process in which reproduction, mutation and extinction are all possible, similar to what happens to living organisms. Using this similarity it is possible, in principle, to build family trees which show the…
The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his…
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same meaning…
Communication plays a vital role in human interaction. Studying language is a worthwhile task and more recently has become quantitative in nature with developments of fields like quantitative comparative linguistics and lexicostatistics.…
The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville (D'Urville 1832). He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from…
The Levenshtein distance is an important tool for the comparison of symbolic sequences, with many appearances in genome research, linguistics and other areas. For efficient applications, an approximation by a distance of smaller…
In a population with haploid reproduction any individual has a single parent in the previous generation. If all genealogical distances among pairs of individuals (generations from the closest common ancestor) are known it is possible to…
We introduce a new measure of distance between languages based on word embedding, called word embedding language divergence (WELD). WELD is defined as divergence between unified similarity distribution of words between languages. Using such…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
This research project aimed to overcome the challenge of analysing human language relationships, facilitate the grouping of languages and formation of genealogical relationship between them by developing automated comparison techniques.…
Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
Traditionally linguists have organized languages of the world as language families modelled as trees. In this work we take a contrarian approach and question the tree-based model that is rather restrictive. For example, the affinity that…
Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as genetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, and the usage of one's vocabulary into other. There are various methods through which LS is…
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not…
A new class of distances appropriate for measuring similarity relations between sequences, say one type of similarity per distance, is studied. We propose a new ``normalized information distance'', based on the noncomputable notion of…
Dialect groupings can be discovered objectively and automatically by cluster analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas. The first step in the analysis, the computation of linguistic distance between each…
The study of spoken languages comprises phonology, morphology, and grammar. The languages can be classified as root languages, inflectional languages, and stem languages. In addition, languages continually change over time and space by…