Related papers: Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
Phylogenetic trees describe the evolutionary history of a group of present-day species from a common ancestor. These trees are typically reconstructed from aligned DNA sequence data. In this paper we analytically address the following…
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…
Phylogenomics heavily relies on well-curated sequence data sets that consist, for each gene, exclusively of 1:1-orthologous. Paralogs are treated as a dangerous nuisance that has to be detected and removed. We show here that this severe…
Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same meaning…
Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their…
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…
This work proposes a tentative model for the calculation of dimensionless distances between phonemes; sounds are described with binary distinctive features and distances show linear consistency in terms of such features. The model can be…
Motivation: The construction of statistics for summarizing posterior samples returned by a Bayesian phylogenetic study has so far been hindered by the poor geometric insights available into the space of phylogenetic trees, and ad hoc…
The problem of reconstructing evolutionary trees or phylogenies is of great interest in computational biology. A popular model for this problem assumes that we are given the set of leaves (current species) of an unknown binary tree and the…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Phylogenetic networks represent evolutionary history of species and can record natural reticulate evolutionary processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene recombination. This makes phylogenetic networks a more comprehensive…
Phylogenies (ancestry trees) depict the evolutionary history of an evolving population. In evolutionary computing, a phylogeny can reveal how an evolutionary algorithm steers a population through a search space, illuminating the…
Computational and human perception are often considered separate approaches for studying sound changes over time; few works have touched on the intersection of both. To fill this research gap, we provide a pioneering review contrasting…
Syllables play an important role in speech synthesis, speech recognition, and spoken document retrieval. A novel, low cost, and language agnostic approach to dividing words into their corresponding syllables is presented. A hybrid genetic…
In this paper, we explore the use of convolutional networks (ConvNets) for the purpose of cognate identification. We compare our architecture with binary classifiers based on string similarity measures on different language families. Our…
This paper presents trainable methods for generating letter to sound rules from a given lexicon for use in pronouncing out-of-vocabulary words and as a method for lexicon compression. As the relationship between a string of letters and a…
Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example 'fonema' in Spanish and 'phoneme' in English are cognates, both of which mean 'a unit of sound'. The task of automatic detection of cognates among any…
We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully…
Protolanguage reconstruction is central to historical linguistics. The comparative method, one of the most influential theoretical and methodological frameworks in the history of the language sciences, allows linguists to infer protoforms…
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…