Related papers: Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
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…
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,…
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…
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…
To fully exploit the potential of computational phylogenetic methods for cognate data one needs to leverage specific (complex) models an machine learning-based techniques. However, both approaches require datasets that are substantially…
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,…
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…
In this paper, we describe the problem of cognate identification and its relation to phylogenetic inference. We introduce subsequence based features for discriminating cognates from non-cognates. We show that subsequence based features…
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…
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…
Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…
Ranking functions in information retrieval are often used in search engines to recommend the relevant answers to the query. This paper makes use of this notion of information retrieval and applies onto the problem domain of cognate…
Phonological reconstruction is one of the central problems in historical linguistics where a proto-word of an ancestral language is determined from the observed cognate words of daughter languages. Computational approaches to historical…
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…
Quartet Reconstruction, the task of recovering a phylogenetic tree from smaller trees on four species called \textit{quartets}, is a well-studied problem in theoretical computer science with far-reaching connections to statistics, graph…
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,…
In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…