Related papers: Automated languages phylogeny from Levenshtein dis…
Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed since half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational…
This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and…
Computational phylogenetics has become an established tool in historical linguistics, with many language families now analyzed using likelihood-based inference. However, standard approaches rely on expert-annotated cognate sets, which are…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
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…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
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…
This work attempts to give new theoretical insights to the absence of intermediate stages in the evolution of language. In particular, it is developed an automata networks approach to a crucial question: how a population of language users…
An evolutionary tree is a cascade of bifurcations starting from a single common root, generating a growing set of daughter species as time goes by. Species here is a general denomination for biological species, spoken languages or any other…
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
We present a method for constructing taxonomic trees (e.g., WordNet) using pretrained language models. Our approach is composed of two modules, one that predicts parenthood relations and another that reconciles those predictions into trees.…
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…
We describe a set of new methods to partially automate linguistic phylogenetic inference given (1) cognate sets with their respective protoforms and sound laws, (2) a mapping from phones to their articulatory features and (3) a typological…
We present a large-scale comparative study of 242 Latin and Cyrillic-script languages using subword-based methodologies. By constructing 'glottosets' from Wikipedia lexicons, we introduce a framework for simultaneous cross-linguistic…
Semantic similarity measures are a key component in natural language processing tasks such as document analysis, requirement matching, and user input interpretation. However, the performance of individual measures varies considerably across…
The concept of a temporal phylogenetic network is a mathematical model of evolution of a family of natural languages. It takes into account the fact that languages can trade their characteristics with each other when linguistic communities…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate…