Related papers: Quantitative methods for Phylogenetic Inference in…
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…
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,…
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…
We propose a statistical method to test whether two phylogenetic trees with given alignments are significantly incongruent. Our method compares the two distributions of phylogenetic trees given by the input alignments, instead of comparing…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…
We propose a model of the evolution of a matrix along a phylogenetic tree, in which transformations affect either entire rows or columns of the matrix. This represents the change of both lexical and phonological aspects of linguistic data,…
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…
We describe a set of new methods to partially automate linguistic phylogenetic inference given (1) cognate sets with their respective protoforms and sound laws, (2) a mapping from phones to their articulatory features and (3) a typological…
This paper introduces PhyloLM, a method adapting phylogenetic algorithms to Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore whether and how they relate to each other and to predict their performance characteristics. Our method calculates a…
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…
As whole genomes become widely available, maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic methods are demonstrating their limits in meeting the escalating computational demands. Conversely, distance-based phylogenetic methods are efficient,…
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 show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not…
The study of spoken languages comprises phonology, morphology, and grammar. The languages can be classified as root languages, inflectional languages, and stem languages. In addition, languages continually change over time and space by…
We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate…
This discussion paper reflects on how quantitative approaches to historical linguistics interact with dataset properties. Drawing on two worked examples, we examine English data using quad-based concept modelling of Early Modern English…
Recently, much attention has been given to understanding recombination events along a chromosome in a variety of field. For instance, many population genetics problems are limited by the inaccuracy of inferred evolutionary histories of…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
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…