Related papers: On the accuracy of language trees
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…
The problem of reconstructing evolutionary trees or phylogenies is of great interest in computational biology. A popular model for this problem assumes that we are given the set of leaves (current species) of an unknown binary tree and the…
Predicting the ancestral sequences of a group of homologous sequences related by a phylogenetic tree has been the subject of many studies, and numerous methods have been proposed to this purpose. Theoretical results are available that show…
Phylogenetic networks are increasingly used in evolutionary biology to represent the history of species that have undergone reticulate events such as horizontal gene transfer, hybrid speciation and recombination. One of the most fundamental…
There are several tools available to infer phylogenetic trees, which depict the evolutionary relationships among biological entities such as viral and bacterial strains in infectious outbreaks, or cancerous cells in tumor progression trees.…
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…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
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…
Reasoning and inference are central to human and artificial intelligence. Modeling inference in human language is very challenging. With the availability of large annotated data (Bowman et al., 2015), it has recently become feasible to…
The supertree problem asking for a tree displaying a set of consistent input trees has been largely considered for the reconstruction of species trees. Here, we rather explore this framework for the sake of reconstructing a gene tree from a…
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…
We consider the phylogenetic tree reconstruction problem with insertions and deletions (indels). Phylogenetic algorithms proceed under a model where sequences evolve down the model tree, and given sequences at the leaves, the problem is to…
Speech-comprehension difficulties are common among older people. Standard speech tests do not fully capture such difficulties because the tests poorly resemble the context-rich, story-like nature of ongoing conversation and are typically…
It is reasonable to hypothesize that the divergence patterns formulated by historical linguists and typologists reflect constraints on human languages, and are thus consistent with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in a certain way. In this…
Phylogenetic inference-the derivation of a hypothesis for the common evolutionary history of a group of species- is an active area of research at the intersection of biology, computer science, mathematics, and statistics. One assumes the…
Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the…
Semantic matching is of central importance to many natural language tasks \cite{bordes2014semantic,RetrievalQA}. A successful matching algorithm needs to adequately model the internal structures of language objects and the interaction…
The reconstruction of phylogenetic networks is an important but challenging problem in phylogenetics and genome evolution, as the space of phylogenetic networks is vast and cannot be sampled well. One approach to the problem is to solve the…
The recent availability of larger typological databases such as Haspelmath et al. (2005) has brought the linguistics community closer to having a solid, empirical foundation for making actual claims about prehistoric migrations, deep…
In molecular phylogeny, relationships among organisms are reconstructed using DNA or protein sequences and are displayed as trees. A linear increase in the number of sequences results in an exponential increase of possible trees. Thus,…