Related papers: Automated words stability and languages phylogeny
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 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…
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…
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…
The evolution of languages closely resembles the evolution of haploid organisms. This similarity has been recently exploited \cite{GA,GJ} to construct language trees. The key point is the definition of a distance among all pairs of…
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…
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.…
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…
There is a great deal of work in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science, about using word (or phrase) frequencies in context in text corpora to develop measures for word similarity or word association, going back to at…
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…
Linguistic coordination is a well-established phenomenon in spoken conversations and often associated with positive social behaviors and outcomes. While there have been many attempts to measure lexical coordination or entrainment in…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
It is known that humans can easily read words where the letters have been jumbled in a certain way. This paper examines this problem by associating a distance measure with the jumbling process. Modifications to text were generated according…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In…
Deterministic automata have been traditionally studied through the point of view of language equivalence, but another perspective is given by the canonical notion of shortest-distinguishing-word distance quantifying the of states.…
Dictionary lookup methods are popular in dealing with ambiguous letters which were not recognized by Optical Character Readers. However, a robust dictionary lookup method can be complex as apriori probability calculation or a large…
Given a timed automata which admits thick components and a timed word $x$, we present a tester which decides if $x$ is in the language of the automaton or if $x$ is $\epsilon$-far from the language, using finitely many samples taken from…
Conducting experiments with diverse participants in their native languages can uncover insights into culture, cognition, and language that may not be revealed otherwise. However, conducting these experiments online makes it difficult to…
The normalized edit distance is one of the distances derived from the edit distance. It is useful in some applications because it takes into account the lengths of the two strings compared. The normalized edit distance is not defined in…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…