Related papers: Phylogenetic typology
Investigating linguistic relationships on a global scale requires analyzing diverse features such as syntax, phonology and prosody, which evolve at varying rates influenced by internal diversification, language contact, and sociolinguistic…
Markov Chains with variable length are useful stochastic models for data compression that avoid the curse of dimensionality faced by that full Markov Chains. In this paper we introduce a Variable Length Markov Chain whose transition…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
The purpose of this study is to provide a new methodology of how one can consistently estimate a change-point in time series data. In contrast with previous studies, the suggested methodology employs only the empirical spectral density and…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Triplet Markov chains are general generative models for sequential data which take into account three kinds of random variables: (noisy) observations, their associated discrete labels and latent variables which aim at strengthening the…
Statistical consistency in phylogenetics has traditionally referred to the accuracy of estimating phylogenetic parameters for a fixed number of species as we increase the number of characters. However, as sequences are often of fixed length…
We present a cross-linguistic study that aims to quantify vowel harmony using data-driven computational modeling. Concretely, we define an information-theoretic measure of harmonicity based on the predictability of vowels in a natural…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
The world is evolving and so is the vocabulary used to discuss topics in speech. Analysing political speech data from more than 30 years requires the use of flexible topic models to uncover the latent topics and their change in prevalence…
Phylogenetic comparative methods are well established tools for using inter-species variation to analyse phenotypic evolution and adaptation. They are generally hampered, however, by predominantly univariate approaches and failure to…
A statistical language model assigns probability to strings of arbitrary length. Unfortunately, it is not possible to gather reliable statistics on strings of arbitrary length from a finite corpus. Therefore, a statistical language model…
Bayesian phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…
Biological phenotypes are products of complex evolutionary processes in which selective forces influence multiple biological trait measurements in unknown ways. Phylogenetic factor analysis disentangles these relationships across the…
This paper presents a comparison of classification methods for linguistic typology for the purpose of expanding an extensive, but sparse language resource: the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). We…
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,…
Recently there has been renewed interest in phylogenetic inference methods based on phylogenetic invariants, alongside the related Markov invariants. Broadly speaking, both these approaches give rise to polynomial functions of sequence site…
We introduce a single generative mechanism with which it is able to describe diverse non-stationary diffusions. A non-stationary Markovian replication process for steps is considered, for which we analytically derive time-evolution of the…
We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…