Related papers: Measures of lexical distance between languages
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
We propose a new similarity measure between texts which, contrary to the current state-of-the-art approaches, takes a global view of the texts to be compared. We have implemented a tool to compute our textual distance and conducted…
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…
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…
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…
This paper presents a new approach for measuring semantic similarity/distance between words and concepts. It combines a lexical taxonomy structure with corpus statistical information so that the semantic distance between nodes in the…
Many information retrieval algorithms rely on the notion of a good distance that allows to efficiently compare objects of different nature. Recently, a new promising metric called Word Mover's Distance was proposed to measure the divergence…
In this paper, we present an algorithm for evaluating lexical similarity between a given language and several reference language clusters. As an input, we have a list of concepts and the corresponding translations in all considered…
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…
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 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…