Related papers: Lexical evolution rates by automated stability mea…
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 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 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…
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 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…
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…
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts,…
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Word embeddings are high dimensional vector representations of words that capture their semantic similarity in the vector space. There exist several algorithms for learning such embeddings both for a single language as well as for several…
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…
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…
Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…
Continuous word representations learned separately on distinct languages can be aligned so that their words become comparable in a common space. Existing works typically solve a least-square regression problem to learn a rotation aligning a…
In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…