Related papers: On the accuracy of language trees

Realignment is a promising strategy to improve cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models. However, empirical results are mixed and often unreliable, particularly for typologically distant or low-resource languages (LRLs)…

Evolutionary models of languages are usually considered to take the form of trees. With the development of so-called tree constraints the plausibility of the tree model assumptions can be addressed by checking whether the moments of…

The pruning objective has recently extended beyond accuracy and sparsity to robustness in language models. Despite this, existing methods struggle to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks when continually increasing model sparsity…

The ancestral maximum-likelihood and phylogeography problems are two fundamental problems involving evolutionary studies. The ancestral maximum-likelihood problem involves identifying a rooted tree alongside internal node sequences that…

Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…

In evolutionary studies it is common to use phylogenetic trees to represent the evolutionary history of a set of species. However, in case the transfer of genes or other genetic information between the species or their ancestors has…

We derive tractable criteria for the consistency of Bayesian tree reconstruction procedures, which constitute a central class of algorithms for inferring common ancestry among DNA sequence samples in phylogenetics. Our results encompass…

Accurately dating historical texts is essential for organizing and interpreting cultural heritage collections. This article addresses temporal text classification using interpretable, feature-engineered tree-based machine learning models.…

In many interesting cases the reconstruction of a correct phylogeny is blurred by high mutation rates and/or horizontal transfer events. As a consequence a divergence arises between the true evolutionary distances and the differences…

While cross-lingual word embeddings have been studied extensively in recent years, the qualitative differences between the different algorithms remain vague. We observe that whether or not an algorithm uses a particular feature set…

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool in understanding evolution. They are typically inferred from sequence data, and capture evolutionary relationships through time. It is essential to be able to compare trees from different data sources…

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…

Combining a set of phylogenetic trees into a single phylogenetic network that explains all of them is a fundamental challenge in evolutionary studies. Existing methods are computationally expensive and can either handle only small numbers…

The history of gene families -- which are equivalent to event-labeled gene trees -- can to some extent be reconstructed from empirically estimated evolutionary event-relations containing pairs of orthologous, paralogous or xenologous genes.…

Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…

The reconstruction of phylogenies from DNA or protein sequences is a major task of computational evolutionary biology. Common phenomena, notably variations in mutation rates across genomes and incongruences between gene lineage histories,…

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for retrieving from a database of trees, all trees that match a given query tree approximately, that is, within a certain error tolerance. It has natural language processing applications in…

Although taxonomy is often used informally to evaluate the results of phylogenetic inference and find the root of phylogenetic trees, algorithmic methods to do so are lacking. In this paper we formalize these procedures and develop…

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…

Likelihood-based methods are widely considered the best approaches for reconstructing ancestral states. Although much effort has been made to study properties of these methods, previous works often assume that both the tree topology and…