Related papers: Automating Sound Change Prediction for Phylogeneti…

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…

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…

Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…

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,…

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 paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…

Historical linguists have identified regularities in the process of historic sound change. The comparative method utilizes those regularities to reconstruct proto-words based on observed forms in daughter languages. Can this process be…

Large pretrained multilingual models, trained on dozens of languages, have delivered promising results due to cross-lingual learning capabilities on variety of language tasks. Further adapting these models to specific languages, especially…

Automatic phylogenetic inference plays an increasingly important role in computational historical linguistics. Most pertinent work is currently based on expert cognate judgments. This limits the scope of this approach to a small number of…

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems struggle with the lack of data for rare accents. For sufficiently large datasets, neural engines tend to outshine statistical models in most natural language processing problems.…

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance,…

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…

This paper proposes a framework for modeling sound change that combines deep learning and iterative learning. Acquisition and transmission of speech is modeled by training generations of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on unannotated…

Identification of cognates across related languages is one of the primary problems in historical linguistics. Automated cognate identification is helpful for several downstream tasks including identifying sound correspondences,…

This paper proposes a model for automatic prosodic label annotation, where the predicted labels can be used for training a prosody-controllable text-to-speech model. The proposed model utilizes not only rich acoustic features extracted by a…

Discrete diffusion language models have emerged as a competitive alternative to auto-regressive language models, but training them efficiently under limited parameter and memory budgets remains challenging. Modern architectures are…

Many animals emit vocal sounds which, independently from the sounds' function, embed some individually-distinctive signature. Thus the automatic recognition of individuals by sound is a potentially powerful tool for zoology and ecology…

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…

Phylogenetic trees elucidate evolutionary relationships among species, but phylogenetic inference remains challenging due to the complexity of combining continuous (branch lengths) and discrete parameters (tree topology). Traditional Markov…

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…